Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Monday, December 19, 2011

Revolutionary developments in on-line education - the role of R&E networks


[In the past couple of days there was a number of interesting announcements in the world of on-line education.

Monday, December 12, 2011

My top 10 predictions for Internet and R&E networks for 2012


[Well folks its that time of year again when self professed pundits make their various forecasts and projections on technology trends on the coming year.

Friday, December 9, 2011

How clouds are transforming education, research and libraries


[I recently the great pleasure of visiting JISC and JANET in the UK and was very impressed on their understanding of the potential of commercial clouds to radically transform education, research and libraries.

Thursday, December 8, 2011

Sunday, December 4, 2011

Open Lightpath Exchanges, The Data Deluge, Software Defined R&E Networks


[Several readers of this blog have pointed to the article in last week’s NYTimes on the genomics data deluge.

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Named Data Networking - how LTE networks will soon be extension of enterprise WiFi


[It amazes me how still many people think that the Internet network architecture is a variant of the telephone system.

Monday, November 7, 2011

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Monday, October 31, 2011

A wider role for National Research and Education Networks?


[Here is a great blog on a topic dear to my heart that I have been blogging about for some time. National R&E networks I believe can play an important role through disruptive innovation in a number of ways:

Friday, October 21, 2011

SURFnet and KPN to collaborate on next generation mobile networks, Internet and IPv6


[Kudos to SURFnet on an exciting new initiative between SURFnet and KPN (Dutch incumbent telephone company).

Thursday, October 20, 2011

The role and purpose of R&E networks


[Neelie Kroes, European Commission Vice-President for the Digital Agenda, recently received the GEANT Expert group report with its views on the future of the pan-European research and education networking.

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

How university IT departments can make money selling spare compute cycles through SpotCloud


[A very innovative  Canadian startup called Enomaly is offering a service called SpotCloud that allows IT departments to sell spare compute cycles into the global cloud market.

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Commercial cloud services for universities and HPC gain momentum - Internet 2 announcement


[Today’s Internet 2 announcement of brokering commercial cloud services from HP, Box and SHI is the start of a major trend that will transform computing at universities and eventually businesses.

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

IPv6 Transitional Uncertainties and the role of R&E networks and universities


[Here is an excellent article on the uncertainties of IPv6 transition. R&E networks and universities probably have the single largest number of unallocated IPv4 address space.

Thursday, September 15, 2011

Very cool project between SURFnet and Ericsson for LTE on Dutch universities

[I am always astounded and amazed how a small R&E networking organization like SURFnet has become such a powerful engine of innovation, not only for Dutch universities, but the Dutch economy in general.

R&E networks once again revolutionizing Internet through content peering

[I recently attended the annual GLIF meeting (Global Lambda Integrated Facility) in Rio de Janeiro where there was a lot of buzz and excitement about recent developments in lambda networking and new transformative business models for R&E networks.

Monday, August 29, 2011

Apple May End Mobile Phone Contract Era - NREN opportunity

[More evidence that Apple is working on software configurable SIMs that will eventually will break the Homer/Bart Simpson stranglehold the carriers have over consumers.

Friday, August 26, 2011

Cool new app to protect on line privacy - Unhosted with Federated Identity


Whenever you post content to the web (images, text, video, music...), it is kept on the servers of that particular application. This means that your online data is stored in centralized servers belonging to various companies, meaning it's not really yours any more.

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Open Flow in the real world: Carriers, clouds and follow the sun/wind networks

[It is exciting to see the concept of software controlled networks pioneered by CANARIE and CRC (UCLP) and other researchers such as Nick Mckeown at Stanford starting to gain momentum.

Apple's strategy to bypass carriers - opportunity for R&E networks to build their own national wireless broadband networks

[Telcos and cablecos are probably the most conservative and least innovative companies in the world.

Monday, August 15, 2011

The future of university CIOs and IT departments

[In this age of financial crises and shrinking budgets, universities and research institutes are going to be under increasing pressure to reduce costs.

Friday, August 5, 2011

So long computer overlords - how clouds can liberate research and transform discovery

[Here is an excellent presentation by Ian Foster on how clouds and grids can liberate researchers from traditional IT research tasks.

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Internet 2 project to broker commercial cloud services to universities

[Here is an excellent presentation by Steve Wallace on an Internet 2 pilot project to broker commercial and private cloud services to universities.

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Great example of commercial cloud for research - research data lifcycle management as a service

[Here is another great example of how the research community can leverage commercial cloud services to develop pressing solutions for the preservation, archiving and provenance of scientific data.

Should funding councils mandate the use of commercial clouds re: - white house announcement

[The recent press release from the White House Office Science Technology Policy highlghts an important and growing trend in research and science around the world.

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Wifi - the cell network for the rest of us

[Universities around the world continue to face a financial crunch as governments slash funding  in order to restrain huge debt loads.

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

The network as a service - why bandwidth on demand is not enough

[Inder Monga, Guy Roberts and Tomohiro Kudoh recently gave an excellent presentation at the Terena conference on abstracting network functionalities as services

Monday, July 4, 2011

How collaboration works or does not work on the Internet - Open Science

[Great TED video on open science and what kinds of open collaboration work - BSA]

Open Science on the Internet

How can the Internet help spread scientific discoveries?

Monday, June 27, 2011

R&E network JANET to broker cloud services for research at UK universities

[I am pleased to see that JANET and SURFnet are once again at the forefront of some very innovative new services such as national wireless and now brokering cloud services.

Friday, June 17, 2011

Some excellent papers on Future of R&E networks

[Here are several pointers to some excellent presentations and papers on future of R&E networks.

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

NLR to provide national personal genome health services - exciting new opportunity for R&E networks

[It has been rumored for months, but yesterday’s announcement from NLR is a real game changer. Personal health services, in particular personal genome sequencing and data storage are going to generate huge volumes of data for R&E networks.

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Overview of national wireless network strategies for R&E networks

[Harold Teunissen of SURFnet gave an excellent overview of developing a national wireless network strategies for R&E networks at the NORDUnet conference this week.

Saturday, June 4, 2011

Momentous changes for R&E networks world wide

[As I have blogged a couple of times in the past few weeks there is a growing momentum among the major R&E networks around the world to move to Open Lightpath Exchanges (OLEs).

Friday, May 27, 2011

Open Science, Science as a Service and Open Lightpath Exchanges

[As I mentioned in my previous blog there is a growing world wide momentum of new R&E network architectures built around open lightpath exchanges (OLEs) also referred to as GLIF Open LightPath  Exchanges (GOLEs).

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

New Developments in R&E network architectures

[Over the past several weeks there has been a lot of exciting developments in the R&E network community at the Spring Internet 2 meeting and more recently at the Terena meeting in Prague about new Internet architectures built around GOLEs – GLIF Open Lightpath Exchanges.

Monday, May 23, 2011

UK R&E network JANET 3G service integrated with eduroam with their own SIM card

[Here is an exciting new service offering by the UK R&E network JANET.  Not only will this meet the need of mobile researchers and students it will provide a new revenue stream for JANET.

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Hot News -Internet 2 network annoucement on OS3E, open exchanges and UCLP

[At the this weeks spring Internet 2 meeting there was a major announcement on Internet 2’s new Open Science, Scholarship and Services Exchange (OS3E) initiative. This could be a real game changer.

Monday, April 4, 2011

Royal Society - Knowledge, Networks and Nations - open exchanges and future of R&E networks

[I highly recommend a recent report from the UK Royal Society called “Knowledge, Networks and Nations” (http://royalsociety.org/policy/reports/knowledge-networks-nations/ ). The Royal Society which is fellowship of some of the world’s most eminent scientists and this report strongly endorses the importance of international collaborative research.

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Why America should be very worried about what is happening in Canada with caps and usage based billing

[A decade Canada was second only to South Korea in terms of broadband deployment and adoption. But unfortunately due to a number of factors including unrestrained market concentration, lack of foreign competition and regulatory capture Canada has fallen to the middle of the pack in terms of broadband deployment. 

Thursday, March 24, 2011

Broadband and Economic Development - a hard look at job creation from all angles

[A very timely and important issue – BSA]
http://www.bbpmag.com/2011s/11economic-dev.php

Dear Colleagues,
Of the many great challenges that the United States faces today, none is more important or urgent than spurring robust economic development in our communities across America.

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Three leadership opportunities for R&E networks to Live in the Future

[Dr Larry Smarr, Director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technologies,  recently gave an excellent talk at Microsoft on “Three leadership opportunities for Washington State to Live in the Future”. 

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

The answer to Network Neutrality, data caps and Usage Based Billing lies with Google, Amazon, Netflix, Apple

[There has been a lot of noise in the blogosphere recently about usage based billing (UBB) and price caps coming to the US. Something I warned would happen based on the Canadian experience. 

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

How R&E networks and universities can earn revenue from their WiFi networks

[As I blogged several times before I believe there is a  significant revenue opportunity for R&E networks and universities by integrating their campus Wifi networks with commercial 3G/4G networks.

Saturday, March 5, 2011

Relocating data centers to colder climates can reduce energy costs by up to 75%

[At the recent On*vector workshop in San Diego, Dallas Thorton of the San Diego Computer Center (SDSC) gave an excellent presentation on CANARIE funded UCSD-McGill project looking at the energy savings by relocating a facility like the SDSC to Canada.

Saturday, February 26, 2011

Financial sustainability for UCAN and R&E networks

[ I am pleased to see that UCAN has established a committee to look at the long term financial sustainability of UCAN (http://www.usucan.org/) . The deliberations and output of this committee will not only benefit UCAN but R&E networks around the world.

Friday, February 11, 2011

A new generation of Research and Education network architectures

[The future of R&E networks around the world is always under constant review.

Could Apple Be Your Next Phone Company?

[These intriguing rumors emanating from Apple could have profound consequences for R&E networks and connected institutions.

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Why the US should be very worried about Canada's debate on Usage based billing

[In many ways Canada is seen as a test market for Internet business concepts that will eventually appear in the US.

Sunday, February 6, 2011

Examples of research and education applications for a national R&E wireless network

[I have blogged many times that I think the next major step for national R&E networks is to deploy national wireless solutions integrated with their optical backbones to support numerous eScience applications in sensor networks, environmental modeling, personal mobile health etc.

Thursday, February 3, 2011

New developments in partnership between R&E and community networks

[I am pleased to see that Mark Johnson, of the North Carolina R&E network has been appointed by Internet2 as the interim head of the  United States Unified Community Anchor Network (U.S. UCAN) initiative.

SURFnet aims to have a national wireless hybrid network by 2015

[Once again The Netherlands is showing global innovative leadership in the development of a national R&E wireless network integrated with their optical backbone.

Sunday, January 30, 2011

Thursday, January 27, 2011

Marriage of Facebook & Telcos - and why we need a National Public Internet (NPI)

[One of the most powerful features of the Internet was that it allowed anyone to establish a web page, or other type of content and make it instantly accessible to anyone in the world. Thanks to the early design of the Internet, specifically the end to end principlel, the smallest web portal, on the most distant point on the planet was on equal footing with the biggest content giants.

That model is now under serious threat by the oligopoly of telcos and cablecos

Friday, January 14, 2011

Thursday, January 6, 2011

R&E networks and universities can once again revolutionize Internet and digital society

[Few people realize that Internet and many of its fundamental applications such as the web were created by the university and R&E network community.   Innovation and fundamental economic transformation by R&E networks  continues to this day in all sorts of related  fields.

Monday, January 3, 2011

Eduroam the key to a National Public "IPv6 only" R&E Internet

[As many have you seen in the press there has been a lot of discussion on overloaded 3G/4G networks and the need for WiFi handoff to handle the huge data volumes now flooding 3G/4G networks