21 st Communiqué - Newsletter #2
Index
1. NSF Announces Global Ring Network Link Up of US, China and Russia
2. Colorado Attorney General Launches Website on Identity Theft
4. VOIP Changing the Telephone Service Landscape
“We see the migration to networked media as a major evolutionary step. By applying the infrastructure and tools of the IT world to content creation, users will enjoy new freedoms: freedoms to create without geographical limits, to collaborate, to have instant access to content and to create media workflows limited only by the imagination.”
Al Kovalick, Chief Technology Officer
Broadcast & Professional Division, Pinnacle Systems
1. Science at 155Mbps
The first round-the-world high-speed computer network ring linking the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a consortium of Russian ministries and science organizations, has commenced operations . The network, known as Little GLORIAD, has a bandwidth of 155 megabits per second and will be used for joint scientific and educational projects, including fusion energy research, distance-learning programs and multi-national science fairs. Little GLORIAD includes the first-ever fiber network connection across the Russia-China border. Little GLORIAD is a first step towards completion of GLORIAD, shorthand for Global Ring Network for Advanced Application Development, a 10-gigabit-per-second optical network around the entire northern hemisphere. “It will substantially improve the manner in which scientists, educators and students can work with and learn from each other on pressing issues of the day,” Dr. Evgeny Velikhov, president of the RRC Kurchatov Institute, said in the NSF announcement.
2. Maintaining Your Identity
Colorado State Attorney General Ken Salazar has launched a website that seeks to battle the rapidly growing problem of identity theft . The Colorado Attorney General ID Theft Prevention and Information website contains information on the scope of the identity theft problem (according to an Federal Trade Commission report released in September of last year, 9.9 million Americans were ID theft victims last year alone) as well as tips on how to avoid becoming a victim yourself.
To visit the Attorney General's ID Theft website click on the following link: http://www.ago.state.co.us/idtheft/welcome.htm
3. “Sir Internet?”
Tim Berners-Lee, the person who proposed the World Wide Web in 1990 and went on to develop key protocols and hyperlinking capabilities, has been knighted by Britain's Queen Elizabeth. According to Buckingham Palace the new knight received the honor because of his “…services to the global development of the Internet.”
4. Your Cable Company is Now Your Phone Company Too?
Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) utilizes the Internet (that has traditionally been used to transfer data such as text files and video files) to provide phone service. VOIP is now seen by traditional telephone companies and competitor cable companies as the way to go in the race to the phone finish line. Why? It's dirt cheap compared with how most landline phone calls are made today. According to Dennis Berman of The Wall Street Journal , one rack of VOIP equipment is about the size of a microwave. Just one of these can replace floors worth of old school telecom switches, each about the size of a refrigerator. VOIP threatens almost a century of regulation that's been tied to traditional telephone networks while promising to reduce traditional phone company capital costs. But now cable companies have a big lead in the VOIP race and are expected to make Net-calling capabilities widely available this year, far ahead of traditional phone companies.
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