An iTWire publication www.itwire.com Editor: Chris Coughlan Tuesday 05 October 2021

Ericsson and PowErLight dEmonstratE worLd’s first wirELEss PowErEd 5g basE

station

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Ericsson and PowErLight dEmonstratE worLd’s first wirELEss PowErEd 5g basE station

as a result of what Ericsson says is its constant pursuit of new technology to improve the deployment of radio access network (ran) sites, the company has teamed up with U.s.

laser innovator, PowerLight technologies, to achieve the first safe, fully wireless-powered 5g base station.

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The proof-of-concept (PoC) demo was achieved recently in Seattle using optical beaming – a laser-based technology that converts electricity into high-intensity light which is then captured and transformed to electricity at the radio base station, the companies said.

No wires were connected to the site from the street power grid network and no on-site power generation was involved. The base station site was completely ‘powerless’ until wirelessly powered over the air through a laser beam.

The achievement is part of a partnership between the two companies to explore and develop innovative 5G solutions aimed at enhancing the speed and flexibility of network deployment in diverse environments, they stated.

The companies said, Wireless power was safely distributed to an Ericsson Street-macro 6701 – a 5G millimeter wave (mmWave) radio base station. It was achieved using PowerLight’s laser technology to transmit hundreds of watts over hundreds of meters through the air.

Ericsson and PowerLight Technologies view the milestone as a major step toward a goal — for subsequent generations of the solution to transmit kilowatts of energy over longer distances.

Ericsson North America head of networks Kevin Zvokel [pictured] says, “Both PowerLight and Ericsson are focused on innovation. This opens new possibilities for Ericsson and our customers. The ability to safely transfer power across distances without having to be connected to the power grid eliminates one of the big obstacles we

have when building new cell sites. The time savings and flexibility gains will make this an attractive solution for our customers.”

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chris coughlan

PowerLight Technologies executive chairman Claes Olsson says, “Most people are aware that wireless charging technology is available today for small electronic devices, such as cell phones and watches. This breakthrough demonstration, which utilised the best innovative technology from PowerLight and Ericsson, underscores the major leaps we have made recently toward the commercialisation of safe, wireless power transmission for larger-scale systems. PowerLight is developing systems today to transfer kilowatts of safe power over distances of kilometers that will be commercially available in the next few years.”

The demo also underlined the safety of the technology – the laser beam has a virtual shield or safety ring that automatically and temporarily shuts down power transmission before any living or inanimate object crosses its path. When the safety ring is activated, the site’s back-up battery takes over until the beam is cleared. Vital base stations use batteries for local energy provisioning to ensure highly reliable mobile services, the companies said.

Apart from rapid street radio rollouts, wireless power could support use cases such as provisional deployments in case of emergency or time-specific densification demands, for example, during music festivals and sport events. It could also support power-cable-free machines such as automated guided vehicles and drones, as well as devices like IoT-sensors and lamps.

Communications service providers will also have the flexibility to position a base station without compromising communication needs in relation to where a power wire is located.

The two companies said they are exploring the possibility of delivering safe wireless power-beaming capabilities to enable cleaner and more sustainable operations for mobile networks.

gLobaL gamE comPany movEs PLatform to EqUinix

Equinix, a digital infrastructure company, has been chosen by application hosting and infrastructure service provider i3d.net to support its global gaming platform. acquired by one of the world’s largest game publishers, Ubisoft, i3d.net provides a global low-latency

network and has partnered with Equinix to gain proximity to its end users following an uptick in activity.

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The gaming market is experiencing solid growth and is forecast to increase from US$42.2b in 2020 to US$46.7b in 2025. In addition to organic worldwide expansion, i3D.net has seen its gaming business grow significantly, with capacity needs doubling. With an uptick in usage and global demand for a highly immersive and consistent end-user experience, as well as new game launches, e-sports events and popularity spikes of a particular game, the need for high-speed connectivity to sync games and perform deployment tests increased.

i3D.net moved its gaming platform to Platform Equinix, integrating into 38 Equinix International Business Exchange(IBX) data centres across the Americas, Asia-Pacific and Europe—to provide the low-latency connectivity necessary to ensure a seamless gaming experience. Widespread cloud adoption and access have changed the way video and mobile games are developed,

delivered and played. By rearchitecting its supporting digital infrastructure accordingly, i3D.net can offer scalability and an instant immersive gaming experience, regardless of location, Equinix says.

“With online gaming undergoing an unprecedented surge in popularity, Equinix can strategically support i3D.net in delivering the best possible user experience to gamers around the world,” said Equinix director of segment marketing EMEA Matt George. “Gamers are always striving to level-up, pushing themselves to better their skills and expanding their game-base; they expect nothing less from developers and providers. With new levels of demand, gaming platforms must be supported by robust digital infrastructure to enable the transfer of information at high speeds to ensure smooth game playing, while also offering the utmost security to protect sensitive player details.”

Equinix said it will provide i3D.net with a dependable and highly connected global infrastructure that offers the requisite processing power and network speed to perform game development builds quickly, using a point-to-point approach. Equinix is the foundation behind the single portal that i3D.net offers its customers where they can easily scale highly customised gaming environments and traffic for the best customer experience. It allocates gaming traffic to burst into multiple cloud accounts that gamers need from AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, through the interconnection of 40 exchanges.

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i3D.net chief operating officer Rick Sloot commented: “We are committed to providing the best experience for our users’ gaming platforms, no matter where they are, so our network is one of the most important pillars of our company. Having healthy interconnection services that connect the i3D.net network with Platform Equinix means we can deliver the lowest latency to our end users, removing the frustration of in-game lag. Equinix’s interconnection services are extremely reliable and powerful, allowing us to grow anywhere in the world.”

Equinix and i3D.net (along with Ubisoft) have a shared outlook on sustainability with both companies announcing their ambition to reduce their carbon footprint. Equinix is the first data centre operator to commit to reaching climate-neutral by 2030 globally, backed by science-based targets and a sustainability innovation agenda. Ubisoft is also working on a carbon footprint reduction plan with a short-term goal to decarbonise its direct operations to reduce emissions by 8.8% per employee (based on 2019 levels) by 2023, and a plan for 2030 which will be submitted to the Science-Based Targets initiative for validation, in line with the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C, Equinix stated.

i3D.net has deployed at Equinix locations in Amsterdam, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Dubai, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Madrid, Milan, Paris, São Paulo, Seattle, Silicon Valley, Singapore, Sweden, Sydney, Tokyo, Toronto, Warsaw and Washington, D.C., Equinix said.

Facebook’s blog and its media statements site both have nothing to say about the outage. The behemoth’s Twitter accounts has two tweets, one about two hours ago, and the other six hours ago.

Essentially, nothing seems to have happened at the company’s headquarters despite reports of a border gateway protocol snafu appearing on every site belonging to world+dog and an outage that lasted more than six hours.

But Cloudflare’s Tom Strickx and Celso Martinho issued a blog post at 21.28 UTC (10.28am AEDT), explaining the ins and outs of how Facebook and its fellow travellers Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus Web went into a black hole, and how they were slowly returning to the Web.

facEbook starts to comE back, bUt cLoUdfLarE tELLs thE taLE

web infrastructure and website security company cloudflare has beaten facebook to the punch in explaining why the latter suffered a major outage earlier today, with the site

disappearing from the web at about 2.30am aEdt.

(continued)

The two said initially, when they opened an internal incident headlined “Facebook DNS lookup returning SERVFAIL” they were afraid that something was wrong with their DNS resolver 1.1.1.1.

But they said they quickly realised that something much bigger was going on when “social media quickly burst into

flames, reporting what our engineers rapidly confirmed too. Facebook and its affiliated services WhatsApp and Instagram were, in fact, all down.

“Their DNS names stopped resolving, and their infrastructure IPs were unreachable. It was as if someone had ‘pulled the cables’ from their data centres all at once and disconnected them from the Internet.”

Strickx and Martinho said at 1658 UTC, they noticed that Facebook was no longer announcing its routes to its DNS prefixes. “That meant that, at least, Facebook’s DNS servers were unavailable. Because of this Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver could no longer respond to queries asking for the IP address of facebook.com or instagram.com,” they wrote.

On checking their database of BGP updates, the duo found a number of routing changes made by Facebook at about 15.40 UTC.

“Routes were withdrawn, Facebook’s DNS servers went offline, and one minute after the problem occurred, Cloudflare engineers were in a room wondering why 1.1.1.1 couldn’t resolve facebook.com and worrying that it was somehow a fault with our systems,” they said.

Due to this, resolvers across the globe stopped resolving their domain names, they said providing a detailed explanation of how the DNS system works.

When Facebook stopped announcing its DNS prefix routes through BGP, Cloudflare’s and everyone else’s DNS resolvers had no way to connect to their nameservers.

“Consequently, 1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8, and other major public DNS resolvers started issuing (and caching) SERVFAIL responses,” Strickx and Martinho said.

“But that’s not all. Now human behaviour and application logic kicks in and causes another exponential effect. A tsunami of additional DNS traffic follows.”

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Peter dinham

sam varghese

They said at about 21.20 UTC, the availability of the DNS name facebook.com on Cloudflare’s DNS resolver 1.1.1.1 returned.

“Undoubtedly Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram services will take further time to come online but as of 21:28 UTC Facebook appears to be reconnected to the global Internet and DNS working again,” the pair said.

“Today’s events are a gentle reminder that the Internet is a very complex and interdependent system of millions of systems and protocols working together. That trust, standardisation, and co-operation between entities are at the centre of making it work for almost five billion active users worldwide,” they concluded.

occ and sUmitomo condUct triaL on foUr-corE sUbmarinE fibrE

manufacturer occ and trading and diversified company sumitomo, a subsidiary of nEc, have completed the first trial of uncoupled four-core submarine fibre, and verified its transmission performance to meet demands of global telecommunications networks.

According to research firm TeleGeography, international data usage is expected to grow by 30-40% from 2020 to 2026, driven by 5G mobile data growth, and content sharing between data centres around the world.

NEC says to meet this demand, submarine networks are adopting space division multiplexing (SDM) technology where the number of independent spatial channels is

increased to maximise total system capacity, reduce power consumption, and optimise cost per bit.

NEC expects multicore fibre to increase parallel optical fibre cores without increas-ing submarine cable size and structure, enabling the second generation of subma-rine SDM systems.

multicore fibre submarine cable features

Conventional single mode fibre has a single core within an individual fibre, and in contrast, each multicore fibre contains multiple cores (four cores in this case), says NEC. This represents a four-fold enlargement in the number of spatial channels for optical fibres and with the same fibre structure: each fibre being 250micrometre diameter (0.25mm) after coating.

kenn anthony mendoza

(continued)

The uncoupled four-core fibre is being deployed within the OCC SC500 series LW (lightweight) cable, which has a 17mm outer diametre and withstands 8,000 metre water depth. This cable can accommodate up to 32 fibres.

With multicore fibre, the number of cores can be increased without increasing the cable diameter benefitting the cost per bit of the cable system.

NEC and OCC have demonstrated that the cable’s optical transmission performance fully meets the requirements of modern long-haul submarine cables. They further showed that the process of cabling Sumitomo Electric’s multicore fibre has no effect on its optical characteristics.

This research was supported by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, Japan, under the initiative Research and Development of Innovative Optical Network Technology for a Novel Social Infrastructure.

qUaLcomm and ssw PartnErs acqUirE vEonEEr at Us$4.5 biLLion

chipmaker qualcomm and new york-based investment partnership ssw Partners have acquired automotive technology company veoneer for Us$4.5 billion in cash.

Qualcomm says the deal has been agreed as an all-cash transaction at US$37 per share.

Veoneer home specialises in developing advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), which piqued the interest of both Qualcomm and Magna, a mobile technology company. ADAS focuses on safety and collaborative driving.

According to Veoneer, it has roughly 7,500 employees in 11 countries, and its sales in 2020 peaked at US$1.37 billion.

Financial statements say Magna expressed interest to acquire Veoneer for US$31.25 per share and offered US$3.8 billion last July.

However, Qualcomm and SSW Partners also had its eye on Veoneer, and offered a US$4.5 billion counter offer. Veoneer then terminated its prior acquisition agreement with Magna, and instead, will pay a termination fee of US$110 million.

kenn anthony mendoza

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In a statement, Qualcomm says SSW Partners will acquire all of the Veoneer’s capital stock. Veoneer will also sell the Arriver business to Qualcomm and retain its Tier-1 supplier businesses.

Qualcomm says it will incorporate Arriver’s computer vision, drive policy, and driver assistance assets into the Snapdragon Ride Advanced Driver Assistance Systems solution.

“This will augment Qualcomm’s ability to deliver an open and competitive ADAS platform for automakers and Tier-1s at scale,” Qualcomm says.

“Qualcomm is the natural owner of Arriver. By integrating these assets, Qualcomm accelerates its ability to deliver a leading and horizontal ADAS solution as part of its digital chassis platform,” remarks Qualcomm president and CEO Cristiano Amon.

“This transaction provides attractive opportunities to our Arriver team at Qualcomm and allows our other businesses to find long-term industrial partners where they can continue to develop,” says Veoneer president and CEO Jan Carlson.

“While Qualcomm focuses on the Arriver business, we will focus on finding strong, long-term strategic homes for the rest of Veoneer’s businesses,” concludes SSW Partners executives Antonio Weiss and Josh Steiner.

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morE kUbErnEtEs sUPPort on EqUinix mEtaL

digital infrastructure provider Equinix has announced expanded support for kubernetes on Equinix metal.

Products and services from Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) Anywhere, Google Cloud’s Anthos, Mirantis Container Cloud, Suse Rancher and K3s, Canonical Kubernetes, IBM Cloud Satellite, Platform9, Rafay and others are now available on Equinix Metal.

Equinix Metal is the company’s interconnected and secure bare metal service that provides a fully automated way for customers to take advantage of Platform Equinix via its DevOps and open-source integrations.

“Kubernetes is the go-to deployment sub-strate for new and evolving applications,” said Equinix Metal senior director of de-veloper relations Mark Coleman.

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“While Kubernetes initially matured in the public cloud with developer-first companies, leaders across all industries are increasingly utilising it to accelerate their move toward the edge and operate complex hybrid and multicloud infrastructures. Offering first-class support for Kubernetes on Equinix Metal through a wide variety of partners helps our global customers move faster while maintaining flexibility.”

Suse president of engineering and innovation Sheng Liang said “Providing our customers with an intuitive experience when running cloud-native workloads across diverse infrastructure has been core to the Rancher value proposition since the beginning of the Kubernetes story. Having partnered with the Equinix Metal team since the early days, it’s great to see their reach grow alongside Suse Rancher’s.

“With Equinix Metal available in global metro locations, our customers can deploy Suse Rancher to span from core data centre through near edge, and then go all the way to the far edge with K3s.”

Canonical vice president of global alliances, public cloud and channels Regis Paquette said “As a long-time Equinix partner, we have witnessed the wide adoption of Ubuntu on Equinix Metal.

“The integration of Canonical’s Charmed Operator framework with Equinix Metal provides a multicloud orchestration solution for traditional and cloud native workloads with bare metal performance. We are excited our partnership now also allows us to provide a managed Kubernetes service on Equinix Metal for customers who prefer to focus on the applications and business outcomes only.”

Tuesday 05 October 2021 No: 20211005 CommsWire Pty Ltd www.itwire.com page 10

EmErgEncy aLErt systEm now rUnning on EvErbridgE

the australian government’s Emergency alert system is now running on Everbridge Public warning in all states and territories.

Emergency Alert, first introduced in 2009, has recently been modernised using the SaaS-based Everbridge Public Warning platform.

The system allows police, fire, and emergency services to alert communities to a likely or actual emergency by sending location-based text messages to mobile phones and voice messages to landlines within a precise geo-targeted area. It also integrates with social media platforms.

“This system is a way for emergency services to warn our community of a pending threat, and we’re pleased that Commonwealth funding is assisting in this risk mitigation which will benefit all Australians,” said Minister for Emergency Management Senator Bridget McKenzie.

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Examples of the events where the system would be used include bushfire, flood, cyclone, extreme heat, and terror attack.

“The Emergency Alert system was originally implemented in response to the 2009 summer bushfires and continues to play a vital role in keeping Australian communities safe,” said Emergency Management Australia director General Joe Buffone.

Everbridge vice president of ANZ and Oceania Steve Foster said “We are honoured to support Australia on the

advancement of its national warning system.

“With no opting in or app download required, Everbridge’s Public Warning platform delivers emergency alerts to at-risk populations on a nationwide scale to help keep Australian residents and visitors, when borders reopen, safe during bushfires and other critical events.

“Every country can benefit from a modern software platform that reaches everyone in times of crisis.”

stephen withers