Fall 2010 - Northern Virginia Technology Council

TelecoM Today: a New woRld of NeTwoRkiNg
network connects more than 14,000 office buildings to some 300
data centers across the country. The company also plans to quadruple
the number of buildings it wires this year. Level 3 has also
seen growth in fiber; the company touts the benefits of operating
an all-IP network as a key to supporting its unified communications
and managed services — and likens data transmission on
legacy networks to a “car on a railroad track.”
Cox became the first multiple system cable operator (MSO) to
enter the business Ethernet market in 2007. Key benefits to consumers
include flexibility and scalability, according to Myers. “Not
all small businesses stay small businesses,” he says. With Metro
Ethernet, “we can increase bandwidth in an hour.”
Across its business offerings, Cox has focused on the small and
medium-sized business market, now claiming more than 260,000
business customers. While the majority takes advantage of phone
and data services, Cox Business is now offering sophisticated bundled
services formerly seen in the enterprise space to smaller businesses,
including managed security, storage, backup and hosting.
“Everybody is going into that segment because it’s been underserved
and is still growing,” Myers says.
Phone and cable companies have also made costly fiber investments
in the consumer market to provide bundled services.
Looking ahead, analysts speculate that these companies’ offerings
could ultimately include such services as connected home security
devices and thermostats that subscribers could control from their
mobile phones.
While fiber is powering so much of our telecommunications
future, there’s another example of going back to the future in the
Ethernet world. XO and others have developed ways to deliver
Ethernet connectivity over the same twisted copper pairings developed
by Alexander Graham Bell; the venerable technology can
now transmit up to 20 Mbps. “It takes a legacy material and modernizes
it,” says Topliesk.
would alert the hospital if it detected a fall in a homebound patient.
Security cameras, transponders that track cargo or trucking
fleets around the world… the possibilities are endless, and companies
are just beginning to explore them.
Outside of San Francisco, Sprint opened an M2M collaboration
center in late 2010 to provide a testbed for such emerging
technologies; some 30 partners are now working at the center to
develop new products for both business and consumer use. One
experiment involves digital billboards, which would use wireless
technology to display targeted advertising in places like shopping
malls — and to tell marketers exactly how many people stop to
look at it. AT&T has opened a similar certification center for what
it calls “non-traditional, wirelessly enabled devices,” including the
Interceptor Ignition Interlock, a court-ordered in-car breathalyzer
that can now transmit data to law enforcement in real-time. The
company says more than 300 M2M devices are now certified to
operate on its network.
According to Sprint, there will be 1 trillion — trillion with a
“t” — Internet-connected devices by 2013. Of them, 412 million
will be M2Mers. Let’s just hope that if the Internet refrigerator
really comes to fruition, it doesn’t decide to start posting pictures
of that moldy Tupperware container sitting in the back
corner to Facebook.
M2M:
The Rise of the Machines
Back in the heady early days of the Internet, there was a lot of
breathless talk about plugging household appliances into the ‘Net
as well as the wall — contraptions like wired refrigerators that
would email the grocery store as soon as they sensed the milk was
running low. While we’re still using pen-and-paper grocery lists,
the machines are starting to talk amongst themselves.
Called machine-to-machine, or M2M, the idea is to allow wireless
devices to communicate with each other without human intervention.
Consider a smart electric meter that sends real-time
information about power consumption back to the utility, helping
avoid brownouts. Or a glucose meter embedded with the same
accelerometer that lets smartphone users play Angry Birds that
The idea is to allow
wireless devices to
communicate with
each other without
human intervention.
Fall 2011 www.nvtc.org THE VOICE OF TECHNOLOGY 19