This morning, you might have noticed that the blog title was changed to “Cloud & Telecom Security”. Yes, it’s true.
From one or two years ago, my interests and focus have changed to around cloud computing and telecom or ICT security, while P2P was touched very occasionally. I believe the new title can reflect the new focus better and hope you like it.
From insiders, the largest mobile carrier – China Mobile has got the first 3G license at China. Surely, it’s TD-SCDMA. It’s said that this betrays the determination of China government to respect the self intellectual property and encourage China enterprises to develop their own technologies.
TD-SCDMA is one of the three major 3G international standards, submitted by China enterprises.
It’s reported that China Telecom will get CDMA2000 and China Unicom will get WCDMA soon.
At Oct. 30, China Telecom, a giant telecom operator of China, host the 6th meeting for its multinational company customer meeting at Nanjing, Jiangsu province, south China. Tens of their MNC customers, including Cisco, Nokia, Ford, Sony and etc. attended the meeting. I joined as well on behalf of Lenovo.
At the meeting, China Telecom introduced its C+W strategy and demonstrate its new product offereing, e.g. global eye service, video conference service, remote training platform and etc.
Riverbed is a widely used appliance that can help accelerate the Wide Area Network (WAN) performance of mission critical applications. At the same time, it can help compress the traffic so that the cost savings of your expensive backbone network. However, before this release, it can not support Domino Notes, which means typically the biggest segment of the backbone traffic. This new release is a good news for the customers that have deployed Riverbed and with Domino applications at the same time.
San Francisco, CA, October 27, 2008 – Riverbed Technology (Nasdaq: RVBD), the technology and market leader in wide-area data services (WDS), today announced the upcoming release of enhanced versions of its Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS®), Steelhead Mobile and Riverbed Services Platform (RSP), which together will provide enterprises with the most comprehensive solution for application acceleration and cost savings across the data center, branch office, and mobile worker. With these releases, Riverbed enables enterprises to further consolidate IT infrastructure, enhance worker productivity and accelerate data protection, helping CIOs support a more efficient workforce and IT environment while reducing operational and financial investment.
Click here to read more.
After years of rumors, the final picture of China telco re-org got announced today. It’s somewhat the same as the gossip inside the circle.
China Netcom(CNC) will be merged into China Unicom to be the new China Unicom. Meanwhile, The “C” and “G” networks of China Unicom will be splitted, while the “C” part will be merged into China Telecom. China Railcom (CRC) will be merged into China Mobile(CMCC).
The executives of the new companies are also mentioned:
This re-grouping is interlocked with the 3G licenses. It’s said that the new CMCC will get TD-SCDMA, while new CUC will get WCDMA, and CT will get CDMA2000.
It’s interesting to watch back to what I summarized the evolvement of China telecommunication industry in the past 10 years.
主流运营商的基础设施上已很少在ATM/FR继续投资，而是更多转向更新的IP/MPLS，表现在市场上，ATM/FR不再是运营商的主推产品，传统的点到点专线价格已呈上升趋势，而MPLS产品则逐渐取得价格优势，成为市场上广域网解决方案的主要选择。这一点在北美地区体现的尤其明显，欧洲运营商也有类似的特征。但是北美和欧洲并不代表世界，中国日本亚太印度中东很多地区传统的专线仍然具备价格优势，依然还是运营商的主要产品构成，而MPLS则处于市场推广阶段。Gartner的技术趋势分析认为大约在2010年，全球的运营商将普遍转向MPLS，帧中继将会彻底退出市场。在未来两三年里，主要的MPLS接入产品将包括专线、xDSL以及以太网。
另外还有一个显而易见的趋势就是Internet正在开始承载越来越多的企业应用，IP VPN被广泛用以企业内部、企业间数据交互以及其他关键度较低的数据业务，例如内容分发以及电子邮件、及时消息等，而将IP话音、ERP/CRM等依然运行在专线和MPLS上面。这时，专线和MPLS则和IP VPN一起构成了一个混合的企业广域网，通过相互间的业务分担和备份，企业可以大幅度降低广域网络的费用。
相对于帧中继和ATM，MPLS的主要优势体现在同一张IP网络上面提供不同应用和不同服务水平的能力， 能够为运营商提供更大程度的灵活性和产品多样性，从而降低运营成本、提高市场反应速度和竞争力。现在越来越多的企业已经或者正在准备将自己的骨干网迁移到MPLS上面来。此时，合理正确的收集用户业务的网络需求，对流量设计合理的优先级(CoS/CDR)以及QoS非常重要。
All the world know there will be an important event at China at Auguest – Beijing Olympic Games 2008, however, here is a reminder to related IT people on network circuit ordering,engineering and changes.
As a traditional custom or non-formal regulation, mainland China will require China telecom companies to “make sure there are uninterrupted communications during the gaming period.”, in other words, aLL major China carriers will freeze their network during the period. This will affect all cities in mainland China.
By network freezing, there will be no change to existing network allowed. This includes addition of circuits, upgrade, downgrade, disconnect and all planned maintenance work.
Although it’s not clear of the exact time period for this network freeze yet, but the effects will most likely be felt from beginning of July to end of September.
Please pay attention to this and plan your infrastructure engineering at China with proper lead time.
Today I addressed on TelecomSec 2007 summit at Beijing. My topic is “Security As A Service of telecom operators”. Here is the slides I used.
Actually I began to thinking security value-added services by telecom operators when I worked for China Telecom before 2000. At that time, it’s only an idea, because the focus of management of China Telecom was totally to grow up number of subscribers and the revenue, without much interests to value-added services.
At Telecomsec 2006, just a year ago, I addressed on “Value of Telecom Security “. I do believe it’s time for China telecom operators to roll out security value-added services. Because the growth of subscribers and ARPU have been shrinking. How to grow benefit and improve user loyalty are the pain of telco executives. At the same time, along with the projects of ITSM inside telecom operators, operation maturity and internal governance have been improved a lot, compared against a couple of years ago. Read more…
Nov. 22-23, the annual conference – Telecom Security Summit 2007 will be happening at Jingdu Xinyuan Hotel, Beijing. At this conference, officers and experts from governance, China Mobile, China Telecom, China Netcom, Huawei, IBM, CA and etc. will present on telecom and security topics, covering security management and communication networks, trustworthy networking, identity and authentication, and etc.
As one of the speaker of this summit, I will address on “Security As A Service” at morning, Nov.23. Under this topic, I hope to illustrate what’s the real security requirements of enterprises and how to make it from telecom operator perspective.
I noticed the report by Infonetics betrayed a fact that “VoIP Equipment Revenue Declines in Q1 07″. According to the author, “This is a seasonal effect more than anything else,” . I don’t think so. I doubt the benefit of VoIP to the end users by posting “VoIP save money?” three months ago. It should be reflecting something more than seasonal effect.
VoIP is a novel technology that can improve the productivity of the fibers and circuits by mulplexing or converging more business into one pipe. So the prediction is the how much you can multiplex into your existing IP pipe. For telco operators, they can easily consolidate adequate voice traffic and multiplex them to make full use of their existing infrastructure. But it’s not always true for average enterprises.
See the full story by Infonetics: Read more…
According to the report of PCWorld, optical fiber is easier to hack or tap than copper wires, opposite to ordinary sense. From personal perspective, I believe it’s safe to use FIBER communication as untappable. But for nation level and even critical commercial level, it’s not safe to rely on only fiber itself, but also the application encryption. Read more…
Now everyone at the world has been knowing Lucent’s acquisition by Alcatel, or anyway, you can say it a merge. Who turned the telecom vendor giant into a prey? Who is the root cause killer of Lucent? Of course, not Alcatel.
When I graduated from PKU and joined China Telecom to start my job career at 1997, Lucent, not long time after the spin-off from AT&T, is the superstar of the stock market and one of the top telecom vendors in the world, full of respects and honors from the industry, along with the upsoaring stock price. Their employees are very proud of their titles and name cards. The red circle logo was the image of success and high stability, reliability. At that time Cisco was merely a challenger with something called “IP” technologies. One of my friends who was going to do an interview at Cisco China offices told me: “I was going to interview to a small company, named Cisco…”. Read more…
Nowadays, the security for telecom operators is expanded to a very wide range, from 3G/IMS/SIP, to IM/P2P filtering, and even security issues related to various VAS(value added services). How to make a plan and blueprint for a telecom operator network security? You must be familiar to not only the BS7799, X.805, CoBit, SSE-CMM, CC and other standards, but those telecom technologies and specificication as well. A very challenging job! Isn’t it?
做电信安全有这么多年了，感觉上越来越累，越来越吃力。因为安全技术和标准的发展很快，更因为电信各种新技术的发展更快！我一向认为，即然是说电信网安全就必须深入电信、体现电信网的特点。这里并不是什么特例独行，也不是故意为了突显电信网的“电信级什么什么”带有的“自我优越感”，而是因为现在的电信网的确是越来越复杂了，而网络安全的内涵也越来越放大，放大到几乎什么“故障”、“中断”、“性能下降”都有可能被冠以网络安全的名下，业务连续性不是被很多安全咨询公司拿来当作自己的顾问服务内容吗。另外，SOX符合性有网络安全的事，城域网优化、网络提质有网络安全的事，垃圾短信、非法广告也有网络安全的事吧，网络安全主管要想办法过滤呀。更有当前的非法VoIP检测、P2P识别也成了网络安全的工作范畴。
呵呵，这下网络安全的饭碗是不是一下子光芒万丈了。如果还想靠防火墙、反病毒、IDS老三样产品，依靠Windows,Unix风险评估加固在电信里打天下，估摸着会越来越吃力。
This post was published at cww.com.cn , 2004, where I summarized the 9 common mistakes at a Security Operations Center(SOC) project, which was becoming hotter and hotter at China. In brief, they are:
1994 is a special year for telecom enterprises at China. Before that year, telecom is a function of the state government, no commercial services and operations. At that year, China Telecom was split off into an enterprise to provide all-telecom-services to the whole country. And at that year, China Unicom was founded to lead in market competition.
2nd year of milestone is 1997. At that year, China Telecom was further split into two parts: China Posts and China Telecom. And at that year, I graduated from Peking University and began to work for China Telecom, Data Communiction Bureau (DCB).
3rd year worthy of attention is 1999, when China Mobile was spin off to a stand alone company. Telecom industry entered into a new era. (BTW, I left DCB at 2000 to find my fortune).
4th year to be mentioned is 2002, when China Telecom was further splitted into two parts: China Netcom (10 provinces at north china) and China Telecom (21 provinces at South China). (Right click to “view image” to see the clearer picture)
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