Thursday Roundup: Brightlink, Windstream, GSMA

It’s difficult to filter the news these days without going too far down the rabbit hole of coronavirus.  I mean, that’s news obviously but other people do that part far better.  But nevertheless, here goes another quick survey of things going on in the telecom and internet infrastructure space – two driven by the pandemic and one determinedly forging ahead despite them.

The CPaaS provider Brightlink is helping the e-Learning company Blackboard scale its infrastructure. With so many doing things from home in today’s world, the companies that provide the capability to do just that are seeing unprecedented demand and are quickly scaling capacity. Blackboard now needs 3 times the bandwidth and cloud capacity it did a month or two ago to serve its students.  I’m actually surprised it’s not more.

Now that we are seeing more and more 400G, 600G, and 800G wavelengths, what’s the next step? Putting giant Ethernet pipes on them. Windstream Wholesale and Infinera demonstrated just that recently with LR8-based 400GbE client-side services. The two have been teaming up quite a bit lately to put the next generation of optical and data technologies to the test.

And the GSMA is moving to establish rules on how the location data that its member mobile operators has on subscribers can and cannot be used. The fight against Covid-19 is causing some quick decisions to be made, as governments seek to use that data to quickly respond to gatherings of people that risk spread of the virus. The ease with which that data can be used to replicate nightmares of Big Brother is quickly apparent. The basic idea right now is to give out the where but not the who, but in some parts of the world governments and carriers are already going way beyond that.

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Categories: Cloud Computing · Fiber Networks · Telecom Equipment · Unified Communications · Wireless