By Andrew Yourtchenko, Technical Leader, Network Operations Systems Technology Group

As any geek, I find it a lot of fun to get some hands with the new technology -- be it a new gadget, new product or a solution.

It’s not very often that I have a chance to play with a whole new protocol. EANTC (European Advanced Network Testing Center) interoperability testing gave me such a chance. The bulk of the work happened on EANTC premises in Germany this past February. The overall activity involved many representatives from various vendors making their devices talk to each other. The goal is to test the protocols in several areas, including MPLS, SDN, and IPv6, but the highlight for me was the testing of MAP (Mapping Address and Port) -- a new protocol to enable the sharing of IPv4 addresses by several customer premise devices without keeping the state at the service provider end.

This protocol is being developed by IETF, and has two flavours, the standards-track “MAP” which uses encapsulation to transmit the packets, otherwise known also as MAP, and the experimental track “MAP-T” -- which uses the address family translation in order to send packets, instead of the encapsulation. Read More »

Tags: asr 9000, asr9k, ipv4, IPv6, Service Provider

Traveling has been a large part of my career at Cisco. Over the last few years I have had the opportunity to travel to customer meetings around the world, discussing their innovation and use cases for Cisco Small Cell Solutions.  What’s interesting is when I spoke with operators in Europe, the prime drivers for WIFI has been connecting cities and stadiums for special events….the summer Olympics was a great example.,   While in the US, I have met with operators about connected stadiums, retail malls, museums and more.   The most interesting story was a visit to the Middle East. We were in Dubai, and seeing some of the examples of where they wanted to take Cisco SP Wi-Fi Solution was fascinating. There was one location in particular that I dubbed “Candy Land”, because it had a retail venue, it had an amusement park, it had a stadium, it had a race track — all in one location on an island. This operator was going to talk to the owner of the island about how they could provide SP Wi-Fi for all of those venues. I was talking to another operator in the Middle East, and one of the things they were looking to provide SP Wi-Fi for was The Hajj. There are millions of people that go to Mecca yearly, and they just need connectivity, for a lot of different reasons; I found that absolutely fascinating. Each part of the globe has unique use cases to each of their country’s cultures and people, but they all want to be part of the wireless world. Read More »

Tags: big thinkers in small cells, mobility, Service Provider, small cell, wi-fi, wifi

By Jason Kohn, Contributing Columnist

In the 20 years we’ve had to get used to the Internet, we’ve learned a lot about web security and our own role in keeping ourselves safe from the nastiest things out there. At the very least, most of us now recognize the need to install antivirus software on our computers and to keep that software updated.

When it comes to the other kinds of computers we use though – our ubiquitous smartphones and tablets – it’s a different story. According to a 2011 report by Canalys, just 4 percent of the smartphones and tablets shipped the previous year had some form of mobile security installed.

Read More »

Tags: antivirus, malware, mobile, security, Service Provider, smartphone, software, tablet

In our last blog, we talked about the next generation Internet. It will be about the Internet of Everything­ ─ people-to-people, machine-to-machine, machine-to-people, trillions of things coming online in coming years. Software Defined Networking (SDN) is only part of the overall solution.  Real-time intelligence, automation and orchestration, instantaneous responsiveness, and unprecedented business and operational agility require a much broader approach. At Cisco we’re already creating the network of the future with our integrated framework, the Cisco Open Network Environment (Cisco ONE).

So now let’s come down to Earth and explore what all of this really means to an average service provider. What new capabilities and use cases does Cisco ONE enable right now?  How does what we’re doing lay another building block for the Internet of Everything?

Start by Visualizing Your Network Read More »

Tags: Cisco ONE, Internet of Everything, Open Network Environment, SDN, Service Provider, software defined network

By Steve Simlo, IPv6 Product Manager, Cisco Network Operating Systems Technology Group

As IPv6 gains more and more ground within the Internet we are starting to see recognition amongst the wider community that technologies such as Carrier Grade NAT (CGNAT) have some significant drawbacks from a service and scalability standpoint. Some of the issues were recently highlighted by a major carrier which actually issued a public “opt out” option to their customers if needed.

However, there are some applications such as online gaming, VPN access, FTP service, surveillance cameras, etc., that may not work when broadband service is provided via a CGN. For our customers utilizing these types of applications, we provide the ability to “opt out” of CGN Read More »

Tags: cgv6, Cisco, Internet of Everything, internet of things, IoT, IPv6, map, Service Provider, Steve Simlo, World IPv6 Congress