US Congresscritters discover Wi-Fi, updates on Oz's nbn broadband plan and much more

Oh no, Congress wants to lead Wi-Fi policy, and to that end representatives Republican Bob Latta and Democrat Jerry McNerney have created the Congressional Wi-Fi Caucus*.

Apparently the caucus will focus on “5G, cybersecurity, internet of things (IoT), smart cities, spectrum optimisation, autonomous vehicles, agriculture, energy, infrastructure, and more”.

The move has been welcomed by the Wi-Fi Alliance, as have a bunch of its vendor members, at least enough to supply boilerplate quotes to the Alliance here.

Iridium to provide direct connection from Things to AWS

At the end of September, Iridium Satellite Communications announced a tie-up with AWS designed to connect IoT devices outside the reach of terrestrial telco networks.

Iridium has signed on as an AWS partner, and the two have worked together developing a service called Iridium CloudConnect, with a simpler process to establish satellite services. Iridium reckons AWS customers will be able to retain their current back-end unchanged.

Itential integrated with Red Hat Ansible Network Automation

Network automation outfit Itential has announced its integration with Red Hat Ansible Network Automation, to let network engineering and IT ops teams create network automation capabilities without writing code.

The integration combines Intel's network automation integrations and adapters with Ansible module, roles, and playbooks.

The Itential software can discover modules, roles, and network configuration actions in a customer's environment to make them easily accessible for use in network workflows.

Itential also supports Ansible Tower, which provides a dashboard and notifications for devops, netops, and app development, along with integrated notification and graphical inventory management.

The company has published Intential modules for Ansible at GitHub.

Coriant upgrading Oz National Broadband Network backbone

The firm building Australia's National Broadband Network has decided its fibre isn't fast enough, and is doubling its speed with an upgrade.

Alas, it's got nothing to do with the speed end-users can purchase from retailers: nbn™ has slapped down the readies to upgrade its backbone network to run 200 Gbps per wavelength from its current 100 Gbps per wavelength.

Coriant's CloudWave Optics is to do the heavy lifting here, and the higher capacity in nbn™'s transit network will result in an aggregate 19.2 Tbps per fibre link.

The company said the system supports upgrades to 400 Gbps per bandwith, which will be useful if Australia ever gets decent to-the-premises links.

Coriant recently became part of Infinera, with the latter's US$230 million acquisition of the former Nokia Networks business closing on October 1.

Arista: 'We've got an Azure product too'

Fortinet and Riverbed weren't the only networking outfits to trot over to Microsoft Ignite with an Azure announcement: Arista was also there, announcing that its Any Cloud software is now supported by the Azure stack.

That brings the cool cats' vEOS Router and CloudVision software to Azure, providing “consistent and secure networking operations and telemetry across multiple public and private cloud environments”, the company said.

The vEOS virtual appliance will run identically on the Azure public cloud and on-premises Azure instances, with a common CLI that has nothing to do with Cisco's CLI okay? includes open APIs, cloud-grade routing, telemetry, and orchestration tools.

Radisys adopts ETSI edge specs

Open telecom outfit Radisys has told SDXCentral it plans to set some suffering engineer to the job of reading enough to adopt the work of the ETSI Multi-access Edge Computing Industry Specification Group, while pursing its commitment to the Akraino Edge Stack.

ETSI's MEC has been working on its specs for some time now – in March 2017 it broadened the scope of the effort, and in July 2017 lobbed the first APIs over the fence.

Those are the specs Radisys said will land in its P4-based (Programming Protocol-independent Packet Processors) data plane.

ETSI updates network protection docs

While we're talking things ETSI, the Euro standards organisation has updated its five-part network security controls publication.

The “Critical Security Controls for Effective Cyber Defence” are based version 7 of the CIS Controls first developed by the Center for Internet Security. ®

* Older readers may recall a exchange on '80s British satire Yes, Prime Minister in which inept politico Jim Hacker's political advisor Dorothy Wainwright explains to Sir Humphrey Appleby: “The Department of Industry marks the grave of industry. The Department of Employment marks the grave of employment. The Department of the Environment marks the grave of the environment. And the Department of Education marks where the corpse of British education is buried” …