Welcome to the Netrality News Roundup!
We’ve selected key articles on the latest news, developments, innovations and revelations in the colocation data center industry.
Don’t miss our bi-weekly news roundups to learn what’s going on with colocation, edge computing, and the brave new world of hybrid cloud, 5G, IoT, artificial intelligence, smart cities, virtual reality, and other technologies at the edge!
Nokia Trumpets Green Credentials with 5G Liquid Cooling Tech
June 3, 2020
Anne Morris, Light Reading
Nokia says its new 5G liquid cooling base station technology helped Finish mobile operator Elisa reduce potential site energy costs and CO2 emissions at its Helsinki site by 30% and 80% respectively. According to Nokia, “This is the first time a commercial 5G liquid cooling solution has been deployed anywhere in the world.”
Liquid cooled sites are said to be silent, require zero maintenance, and can be 50% smaller and 30% lighter than standard active air conditioning units. “They offer operators and owners of base station sites significant savings and potentially longer basestation component life,” the vendor added.
Cooling servers by submerging them in a dielectric fluid that does not conduct electricity is a breakthrough for both server performance and the environment. It is hundreds of times more efficient than air cooling, and server density can far surpass what is possible in air-cooled data centers. Going forward, conventional data center cooling methods will no longer hold up under the heavy processing demands of AI, 5G wireless, IoT, and the rise of smart cities.
NXP Releases New MIFARE DESFire to Support Smart City Applications
June 2, 2020
Eric Weiss, MobileID World
“NXP has upgraded its offerings with the release of the MIFARE DESFire EV3 IC. The EV3 is the third iteration of the contactless MIFARE DESFire product, and introduces a slew of performance improvements to support a number of different smart city applications.
The EV3 has a greater scanning range than its predecessors. It offers faster transaction speeds, and is backwards compatible with previous MIFARE DESFire products. Potential applications include parking, access control, and mass transit programs.”
Smart cities will have numerous interconnected networks of remote sensors and endpoints constantly collecting, processing, and analyzing massive amounts of data. This will require ultra-low latency, two-way connectivity between sensors and devices. Urban-based, interconnected data centers will be crucial to the success of smart cities as they continue to proliferate across the globe.
Oracle Looking to Sell 5G Core to Network Operators
June 1, 2020
Mike Dano, Light Reading
Oracle said it plans to sell 4G and 5G core network services to mobile operators starting later this year. The company said the offering would run inside Oracle’s cloud and would be available “as a service,” meaning operators will be able to pay only for what they need on a recurring basis; they will no longer have to purchase equipment under the “Mother’s Day rule,” whereby they must invest in enough equipment to handle their biggest traffic days. Instead, they can scale up and down as needed, paying only for what they use.
Oracle’s entry into the 5G core market comes as little surprise. The still-nascent versions of 5G mostly rely on 4G cores because standalone 5G isn’t widely available yet. But a number of operators – including all of the major operators in the US – are planning to deploy 5G standalone cores in the next year or so. This will give them much more flexibility than they have today using 4G cores.
How Amazon, Microsoft and Google are Courting – and Challenging – Telcos
Sue Marek, Light Reading
June 4, 2020
“The big three public cloud providers (Amazon, Microsoft and Google) are investing in tools to help telecom operators handle 5G traffic at the network edge. And they also are hoping to create new business opportunities in 5G service delivery, private networking and the Internet of Things. At the same time, telecom operators are increasingly looking at the cloud providers as a way to optimize their edge networks and make low-latency applications like virtual reality and multi-player gaming feasible.
However, don’t expect telecom operators to put all their eggs into one public cloud basket. Analysts say that carriers are unlikely to sign an exclusive deal with one cloud provider and will most likely have agreements with two or three public cloud providers. ‘The telcos don’t want exclusive deals. They want to give customers a choice and create competition. AWS, Google and Azure will all be in there,’ said Roy Chua, founder and principal of AvidThink, a research and consulting firm.”
The overlap between the cloud companies and telecom players is steadily increasing. For mobile operators to deliver the speed and bandwidth 5G and edge computing require, they need to partner with public cloud providers. But when it comes to private networking, those same cloud providers may well become competitors. This type of coopetition will be a difficult balancing act but will ultimately give customers more choice
Google Meet Switches On Jaw-Dropping Feature To Beat Zoom & Microsoft Teams
David Phelan, Forbes
June 10, 2020
Google Meet, Google’s video conferring platform, is looking to gain a competitive edge over Microsoft Teams and Zoom by adding noise canceling features to its video conferring. This is a feature Teams promised it would add in future updates, however, Google is the first to introduce it to its G Suite customers, with iOS and Android to follow. Google Meet is working to win and keep customers, both business and personal, as most people are utilizing video conferencing as a new standard for daily communication.
Serge Lachapelle, G Suite director of product management, has been working on video conferencing for 25 years, 13 of those at Google. As most of the company shifted to working from home, Lachapelle’s team got the go-ahead to deploy the de-noiser in Google Meet meetings. The Cloud De-Noiser as it’s called uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to manage what noises should be cancelled out, data, privacy, and user experiences.
