Altel changes roaming rates in CIS

Kazakhstan mobile operator Altel has modified its roaming rates in the CIS states, as well as in Georgia and Ukraine. Incoming calls cost KZT 55.73 per minute, and outgoing calls cost KZT 334.40 per minute in Armenia, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan and Russia. In Azerbaijan, Georgia, Ukraine, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, incoming calls cost KZT 234.08 per minute, and the rate of outgoing calls is KZT 928.88 per minute.

Cubans hope U.S. ties bring better Internet access

HAVANA — The line outside the Internet cafe in theMiramar neighborhood of this city forms early each day with patrons waiting up to two hours for a chance to send e-mails, chat online or update their Facebook page. The service may be slow, unreliable and expensive, but still they come.

"I need to keep up," said Carlos Lopez, 71, who rents out rooms in his home to tourists and checks his e-mail twice a month for reservation requests. "I don't have Internet at home, so I have no choice."

The topics of improving telecommunications on the island and connecting more Cubans to the Internet — major tenets of the United States' diplomatic strategy here — were discussed this week during high-level talks between the U.S. and Cuban government in Havana.

How soon and how far-reaching changes will be to Cuban's telecom network remains to be seen. Just 5% of Cuba's 11 million residents have access to the Internet — one of the lowest rates in the hemisphere. Cuba's state telecom company, ETECSA, maintains a monopoly on Internet service.

Two years ago, more than 100 cybercafes opened across the island, but connections remain frustratingly slow and expensive. An hour of Internet service costs around $5 — equal to a week's salary for the average Cuban.

Even more enticing to Cubans is the prospect of Web and e-mail access on smartphones, currently unavailable to island residents.

Alejandro Robaina Cardoso, owner of Havana's La Casa paladar, or privately run restaurant, said allowing Internet access on smartphones would boost his business. Tourists visiting his eatery often request Wi-Fi, which he doesn't have. Cardoso owns a Samsung Galaxy smartphone but can use it only to make and receive calls because the other features are not possible in Cuba.

A few years ago, Cardoso hired a social media manager to keep his restaurant updated on sites such as TripAdvisor.com and Facebook and to run a blog. But until Cuba's technology catches up, his business will suffer, he said.

"We are like in another world, like in the time of the dinosaurs," Cardoso said. "That has to change. Everyone's waiting for it."

The Cuban government will need to loosen reams of rules and restrictions to implement an effective telecommunications network, said Ted Henken, a Baruch College Latino studies professor and longtime Cuban author and scholar. Cuban officials will have to decide how much access to the world they will allow their citizens and how fast they want to move in that direction, he said.

The Obama administration "is eliminating as many obstacles to the Internet, to commerce, to all the rest as fast as it can," he said. "The onus is now on the Cuban government to respond to the demands of the Cuban people."

Across Havana, Cubans followed news of this week's U.S.-Cuba meetings closely for signs that their Internet connectivity could soon improve. Joana Ramirez, 28, a Havana waitress, has to catch rides to a cybercafe then wait in line to check her e-mail. She said she hopes improved relations with the U.S. will soon change that.

"The people of Cuba want change," she said. "A lot of people don't have computers, don't have Internet. It's a big problem."

A1 launches A1 NOW mobile TV service nationwide

Austrian operator A1 has announced the commercial launch of the new A1 NOW mobile TV service. This gives customers access to 41 linear TV channels, including nine in HD. The nationwide launch follows a beta trial at end-2015 with over 1,000 participants. The service will be offered free until end-2016 for A1 smartphone tariff and fixed-line internet customers who signed a contract between 18 November 2013 and 26 February 2016, as well as all new and existing A1 Go! Premium customers.

A personal online video recorder allows users to access all available linear TV channels for up to seven days after broadcast, as well as being able to store up to 10 hours TV content for up to three months. The A1 NOW Library gives users free on-demand access to Austrian TV series.

Data used with this streaming service is not included, with A1 recommending that customers have a tariff with at least 2 GB data. Once the promotional offer ends, the service will cost EUR 7.90 a month. The A1 NOW app is available for Android and iOS. The service can also be accessed through a web browser.

Shilpi Cables partners with Eyecom Telecommunications

MUMBAI: Cables manufacturer Shilpi Cable Technologies (SCTL) has partnered with New Zealand headquarteredEyecom Telecommunications Equipments to make a foray into the antenna business with a view to offer end-to-end solutions to telecom operators.

"We are already present in the telecom sector through our radio Frequency (RF) wires business. But now we aim to provide complete end-to-end solutions to the operators and making a foray into the antenna business is a part of this strategy," SCTL Chief Executive Officer Manish Bhatt told PTI here today.

He said with the joint venture SCTL will become a one-stop RF path solution provider in the telecom space and introduce base station antenna (BSA) products for 2G/3G/4G and next generation roll-outs in India.

"The rollout of 4G, penetration of smart phones and growing demand for data as well as government's push on Digital India has necessitated enhancing the current telecom network. So far, we have been secondary product suppliers. But with this JV we want to emerge as a complete solution provider," he said.

SCTL plans to set up a manufacturing facility at Chopanki in Rajasthan which will have a capacity of 15,000 antennas per month. The facility would also produce other products such as repeaters and IBS passive components.

"For the entire path, nearly 150 products are required. Eyecom will transfer the technical know-how for manufacturing and carry out R&D for the future technologies relevant for the Indian market, which is currently estimated at around Rs 1,500 crore," Bhatt said, adding the company can achieve nearly 30 per cent share over the next 3 years.

With this partnership, the company expects a turnover of up to Rs 1,500 crore from the telecom business. "Our telecom business currently contributes around Rs 300 crore to total revenues. But in the next 3 years, we expect this to increase to up to Rs 1,500 crore," he said.

Commenting on the JV, Eyecom General Manager Guan QI said, "This partnership marks our entry of Eyecom in one of the fastest growing telecom markets in the world."

Apple, Nokia and Qualcomm eye wireless telecommunications specialist InterDigital

The auction of the wireless telecommunications specialist - expected to be heavily contested as giant tech companies fight to shore up patent portfolios - will be postponed from next week until after Labor Day, the sources said.

Shares in InterDigital, which has a market value of about $3 billion, leaped as much as 12.2% on the news. But it quickly backtracked and was up $4.38 or 6.8% at $68.41 in afternoon trade.

Key potential bidder Google has not formally withdrawn from the auction but it is unclear whether the Internet leader will bid for the company, the sources said.

'Magic wand' created to improve healthcare, cybersecurity

The system, called "Wanda," will be presented at the IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications in April.

"Wanda" is part of a National Science Foundation-funded project led by Dartmouth called "Trustworthy Health and Wellness." THaW aims to protect patients and their confidentiality as medical records move from paper to electronic form and as health care increasingly moves out of doctors' offices and hospitals and into the home.

David Kotz, a professor of computer science at Dartmouth, says wireless and mobile health technologies have great potential to improve quality and access to care, reduce costs and improve health. "But these new technologies, whether in the form of software for smartphones or specialized devices to be worn, carried or applied as needed, also pose risks if they're not designed or configured with security and privacy in mind."

One of the main challenges is that most people don't know how to set up and maintain a secure network in their home, which can lead to compromised or stolen data or potentially allow hackers access to critical devices such as heart rate monitors or dialysis machines. There are three fundamental operations when bringing a new mobile device into the home, workplace or clinic: to configure the device to join the wireless local-area network; to partner the device with other nearby devices so they can work together; and to configure the device so it connects to the relevant individual or organizational account in the cloud.

In the new Dartmouth-based project, doctoral student Tim Pierson developed "Wanda," a small hardware device that has two antennas separated by one-half wavelength and uses radio strength as a communication channel. The clever solution makes it easy for people to add a new device to their home (or clinic) Wi-Fi network: they simply pull the wand from a USB port on the Wi-Fi access point, carry it close to the new device and point it at the device. Within a few seconds, the wand securely beams the secret Wi-Fi network information to the device. The same method can be used to transfer any information from the wand to the new device without anyone nearby capturing the secrets or tampering with the information.

"People love this new approach to connecting devices to Wi-Fi," says Pierson. "Many of our volunteer testers remarked on the frustration they've encountered when configuring wireless devices at home and ask when they can take our wand home."

Kotz adds: "We anticipate our `Wanda' technology being useful in a wide variety of applications, not just healthcare, and for a wide range of device management tasks, not just Wi-Fi network configuration."

The THaW team conducts research related to mobile and cloud technology for health and wellness applications, including authentication and privacy tools to protect health records, methods to secure small-scale clinical networks and efforts to reduce malicious activity in hospitals. Supported by a $10-million, five-year grant from the NSF's Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace program, the Frontier-scale project includes experts in computer science, business, behavioral health, health policy and healthcare information technology at Dartmouth College, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), the University of Michigan and Vanderbilt University.

Source :- http://www.sciencedaily.com/

concept of protocol and standard

Protocols

In information technology, a protocol (from the Greek protocollon, which was a leaf of paper glued to a manuscript volume, describing its contents) is the special set of rules that end points in a telecommunication connection use when they communicate. Protocols exist at several levels in a telecommunication connection. For example, there are protocols for the data interchange at the hardware device level and protocols for data interchange at the application program level. In the standard model known as Open Systems Interconnection (OSI), there are one or more protocols attach layer in the telecommunication exchange that both ends of the exchange must recognize and observe. Protocols are often described in an industry or international standard.

StandardsA common set of rules.

 

Standards Organization

Standards creation Communities

IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers)
IEEE's Constitution defines the purposes of the organization as "scientific and educational, directed toward the advancement of the theory and practice of Electrical, Electronics, Communications and Computer Engineering, as well as Computer Science, the allied branches of engineering and the related arts and sciences." The IEEE is incorporated under the Not-for-Profit Corporation Law of the state of New York, United States. It was formed in 1963 by the merger of the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE, founded 1912) and the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. It has more than 400,000 members in more than 160 countries, 45% outside the United States.In pursuing these goals, the IEEE serves as a major publisher of scientific journals and a conference organizer. It is also a leading developer of industrial standards (having developed over 900 active industry standards) in a broad range of disciplines, including electric power and energy, biomedical technology and health care, information technology, information assurance, telecommunications, consumer electronics, transportation, aerospace, and nanotechnology. IEEE develops and participates in educational activities such as accreditation of electrical engineering programs in institutes of higher learning.
IEEE is one of the leading standards-making organizations in the world. IEEE performs its standards making and maintaining functions through the IEEE Standards Association. IEEE standards affect a wide range of industries including: power and energy, biomedical and health care, Information Technology (IT), telecommunications, transportation, nanotechnology, information assurance, and many more. In 2005, IEEE had close to 900 active standards, with 500 standards under development. Wireless Networking standard.

HTTP Methods

 HTTP Methods

HTTP methods are similar to commands given to an application. Depending on the method used in the request, the server's response will vary. Successful responses to some request methods do not even contain body data.
The HTTP/1.1 standard defines the methods GET, POST, OPTIONS, HEAD, TRACE, PUT, DELETE, CONNECT. The most often used methods are GET and POST.

• [GET]is used to retrieve an entity of information without the need to submit additional data in the message body. Before HTTP 1.0, GET was the only method to request information.
• [POST]is similar to a GET request, but POST always includes a message body in the request message to send information of any type to the server. Usually information submitted via POST is used to generate dynamic content, for further processing, or the information is simply stored to be used by other applications. POST is a method that was introduced with HTTP version 1.0.

To send information to the server with GET, the client has to append it to the request URI. That causes several difficulties however:

• The length of the request URI can cause problems at the server,
• some clients can only transmit a Request URI of a certain length
• most clients display the additional Request URI information to the user

Even though POST is the better way to transmit additional information to the server, some applications use GET for that purpose, especially for small amounts of data or to allow bookmarking of the URL.
All other methods are rarely used and will only be covered briefly:

• [HEAD]This method asks for the header of a reply only. It can be used when checking for the existence of a certain document on a web server. The response will look exactly as if requested via GET but will not include the message body
• [OPTIONS]Using this method a client can query a server for the available methods and options concerning a resource.
• [TRACE]The TRACE method is similar to ping in TCP/IP. The request message contains a mandatory header field called Max-Forwards. Each time the message passes a proxy server, the value of that field is decremented by one. The server that gets the message with a value of zero will send a reply. If the server to whom the message is addressed gets the message, it will send a reply regardless of the value in the max-forwards header field. Using a sequence of these requests, a client can identify all proxy servers involved in forwarding a certain request.
• [PUT]used to transmit files to a server. This method is similar to the PUT command used in FTP. This imposes a security threat and is therefore almost never used.
• [DELETE]This method asks the server to delete the file addressed in the URI. Since this method imposes a security risk no known productive HTTP servers support that method. The DELETE method is very similar to the DELETE command in FTP.
• [CONNECT]is a command used to create a secure socket layer (SSL) tunnel through a HTTP proxy server. A proxy server addressed with that method would open a connection to the target server and forward all data regardless of its content. That way a secure connection can be established from client to the server even though a proxy server is in use.

Types of computer networks, protocols and standards

Types of computer networks, protocols and standards

1. 1. Computer Networks Introduction to computer networks
2. 2. Objectives • Define computer networks • Classify computer networks • Protocols & Standardization
3. 3. Computer Networks ? • A large number of separate but interconnected computers do the specific job. • A collection of autonomous computers interconnected by a single technology.
4. 4. Interconnected ? Two computers are said to be interconnected if they are able to exchange information.
5. 5. Types of Networks Classification based on transmission technology Broadcast links. Point-to- point links.
6. 6. Broadcast networks • Have a single communication channel that is shared by all the machines on the network. Host H1 H2 H3 H4 H5H6 Communication channel
7. 7. Broadcast networks • Short messages (also called packets) sent by any machine are received by all the others. • An address field within the packet specifies for whom it is intended. • Upon receiving a packet, a machine checks the address field. • If the packet is intended for the receiving machine, it processes the packet; otherwise it is just ignored. • This mode of operation is called broadcasting
8. 8. Bus Topology Ring Topology
9. 9. point-to-point networks • Many connections between individual pairs of machines. • To go from the source to the destination, a packet on this type of network may have to first visit one or more intermediate machines.
10. 10. Note: • As a general rule, smaller, geographically localized networks tend to use broadcasting, whereas larger networks usually are point-to-point
11. 11. Types of Networks Classification based on Scale (physical size) •LAN • MAN •WAN
12. 12. Local Area Networks • Within a single building or campus of up to a few kilometers in size. • They are widely used to connect personal computers and workstations in company offices and factories to share resources (e.g., printers) and exchange information.
13. 13. Three characteristics of LANs size, transmission technology, topology. few kilometers in size single cable , speeds of 10 Mbps to 100 Mbps Bus, Ring
14. 14. Metropolitan Area Networks • A MAN covers a city. • Ex:- cable television network
15. 15. Wide Area Networks • WAN, spans a large geographical area, often a country or continent. • The hosts are connected by a communication subnet, or just subnet for short. • The hosts are owned by the customers, whereas the communication subnet is typically owned and operated by a telephone company or Internet service provider.
16. 16. Subnet • The job of the subnet is to carry messages from host to host, just as the telephone system carries words from speaker to listener. • The subnet consists of two distinct components: –transmission lines and –switching elements.
17. 17. Transmission lines move bits between machines. They can be made of copper wire, optical fiber, or even radio links. Switching elements are specialized computers used to connect two or more transmission lines.
18. 18. Principle of Subnet • When a packet is sent from one router to another via one or more intermediate routers, the packet is received at each intermediate router in its entirety, stored there until the required output line is free, and then forwarded. • A subnet using this principle is called a store- and-forward or packet-switched subnet.
19. 19. • Routing algorithms are used to choose the path between source and destination.
20. 20. Wireless Networks • wireless networks can be divided into three main categories: 1. System interconnecti on 2. Wireless LANs 3. Wireless WANs.
21. 21. System interconnection • Connecting the components of a computer together using short-range radio. • Bluetooth to connect the components without wires. • Bluetooth also allows digital cameras, camcorders, scanners, and other devices to connect to a computer by merely bringing them within range.
22. 22. System interconnection using Bluetooth Configuration
23. 23. Wireless LANs • These are systems in which every computer has a radio modem and antenna with which it can communicate with other systems.
24. 24. Wireless WAN • Example:- cellular networks • cellular wireless networks are like wireless LANs, except that the distances involved are much greater and the bit rates much lower.
25. 25. Protocols & Standardization • Human analogy
26. 26. What is a protocol? • The formal specifications and conventions that govern and control the communications and data exchange. • Protocols are the standards for communications, networking, and internet networking..
27. 27. Standards • Traditional standards –Ex: TCP/IP • Judicial Standard o ISO/OSI

Networking and its criteria

NETWORKS

A network is a set of devices connected by communication links.A node can be a computer,printer or any other device capable of sending or receiving data generated by other nodes on the network.


DISTRIBUTED PROCESSING

Most networks use distributed processing in which task is divided among multiple computers.instead of one single large machine being responsible for all aspects of a process ,separate computers handle asubset.

NETWORK CRITERIA

A network must be able to meet a certain number of criteria. The most important of these are performance,reliability,and security.

Performance 
Performance can be measured in many ways including transit time and response time.Transit time is amount of time required for a message to travel from one device to another.Response time is the elapsed time between an inquiry and a response.

Reliability
In addition to accuracy of delivery,network reliability is measured by the frequency of failure,the time takes a link to recover from a failure and the networks robustness in a catastrophe.

Security
Network security issues include protecting data from unauthorized access,protecting data  from damage and development and also implementing  policies.