WiMax

Security costs money. That is why businesses and even governments are reluctant to allocate funds for security unless they perceive a dire necessity for doing so. Additionally, security is a matter of degree, never an absolute, and determining appropriate security ... [full story]

Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) is a complex piece of federal legislation that expands law enforcement’s authority to conduct electronic surveillance, including surveillance over public networks. It has been recently reinforced by provisions contained within the USA PATRIOT ... [full story]

Denial-of-service (DoS), or flooding attacks, have been used for many years by hackers. They are launched by capturing a large number of terminals and using them to transmit meaningless messages that flood the public network affected beyond its carrying capacity. ... [full story]

Securing network elements is, of course, vital to the integrity of the operation. While direct attacks on equipment operating systems intended to disable networks for lengthy intervals are not at all commonplace, intrusions into management systems have occurred in the ... [full story]

Previous chapters have already covered firewalls. Firewalls are the first line of defense for the security administrator, but they should not be considered complete security solutions in and of themselves. Closely related to firewalls and sometimes included in the category ... [full story]

Hackers have a variety of motives, and their ploys tend to reflect that fact. Some regard network intrusion as a harmless sport and do little or no damage after they have achieved access. Others regard sabotage itself as a sport ... [full story]

Whole books have been written on the subject of software-based network sabotage, and they will continue to be written simply because hacker tools and utilities are continuing to evolve. In this section I can suggest only the rudiments of a ... [full story]

Another part of security and good network management is to make certain that high-quality electrical power will be available at all times even in the event of a power outage. This involves several distinct measures. The AC power provided by ... [full story]

Managing the network for profitability remains the biggest challenge facing broadband wireless operators. Installing and operating the physical plant is fairly straightforward; the integration of the various kinds of business software necessary to make it all function smoothly with little ... [full story]

Many OSS software developers follow a markedly different approach to OSS software integration by working toward standardization of common application programming interfaces (APIs) rather than comprehensive interoperation standards. Such APIs permit software to exchange information and pass through commands in ... [full story]

In existence today are protocols and standards providing for the exchange of information among network elements and associated software control systems (that is, network element management software modules and network management software modules). Two such protocols are used more than ... [full story]

As indicated earlier, the best-of-breed approach prevailing in the service provider community in respect to OSS has led to major software integration problems—problems for which, unfortunately, no easy solution is in sight. Industry groups such as the Institute of Electrical ... [full story]

Data mining refers to a specialized type of analytical software that looks for patterns and relationships within the information contained in a comprehensive database, and it forms a class unto itself that is not directly connected with the larger customer ... [full story]

Customer relations management (CRM) software as a product category encompasses a vast array of software offerings, by no means all of which are designed around the needs of telecommunications service providers. The term most commonly refers to software used in ... [full story]

Assurance OSS software refers to the management process of determining that changes in services and the corresponding changes in billing have in fact been carried out and, specifically, that stipulated service levels are being met. [full story]

Billing and mediation software forms a large subcategory of OSS. Such software will usually be tied in with the provisioning, network element, and network management software to register changes in service and to track subscriber usage if the service plan ... [full story]

A large subcategory of OSS customer care products is concerned with provisioning, that is, setting up services for existing accounts as well as signing on new customers and providing them with services. Provisioning software can completely eliminate the need for ... [full story]

The second major division of OSS has for its objective the automation of the service desk. OSS will not entirely eliminate the need for telephone agents to answer queries and deal with complaints, but what it will do is handle ... [full story]

A final subcategory that stands a little apart from the others is network-planning software. I have already covered software used for siting base stations and determining coverage, but overall network-planning software goes beyond the mere positioning of equipment and attempts ... [full story]

A third subcategory within the overall category of infrastructure management tools involves the processes of discovery and inventory management. For a network management system to operate effectively, it must utilize an accurate database that lists all the network’s physical resources, ... [full story]

Network management software addresses such integration problems as well, though it generally does more than that. The term commonly refers to products intended to manage the network as a whole and to mediate between disparate network element management systems. The ... [full story]

Network element management software refers to control software for the various devices that make up the network, including routers, switches, and the radios themselves. Newcomers to telecommunications may be surprised to learn that in many cases the same basic elements ... [full story]

Within the first subcategory, which is network-centric, two further subcategories may be identified: network element management and network management. The first category is not necessarily the province of the independent software provider, but the second almost always is. [full story]

Several well-defined subcategories of OSS software exist today along with perhaps an equal number of less distinct groupings. A number of different taxonomies emphasizing different aspects of the technology may be constructed to incorporate all of the various subcategories, but ... [full story]

OSS is largely a development of the last 20 years. Traditional telephone and cable television networks were not highly automated in respect to business functions, and the enterprise software used within service provider central offices seldom communicated directly with network ... [full story]

OSS has grown to become a vast field, and the products it encompasses now occupy a multitude of subcategories. So various are the functions involved in the management of a service network that summarizing OSS in a sentence or two ... [full story]

Routers themselves come in several forms that are determined by the function of the device in the network. Core routers are huge, costly devices placed at major Internet access points and hubs and handle the enormous volumes of long-distance Internet ... [full story]

As indicated earlier, wireless networks can utilize a number of transport protocols for handling traffic to and from the subscriber premises and wide area networks (WANs), but the 802.16 standard is based on using Internet Protocol (IP). Given that, routing ... [full story]

During the middle and late 1990s, VPNs utilizing frame relay and/or ATM connections—what have come to become known as fast packet connections, though ATM is not really packet based—became popular, and they are still present in the marketplace today, particularly ... [full story]

I can dismiss in a few words pure circuit services. It is perfectly possible to create a VPN by concatenating T1 connections over distance, and such “nailed-up” VPNs were commonplace in the 1980s and early 1990s before telcos offered packet ... [full story]

The first category is not properly the province of the service provider at all. Here the subscriber simply leases an Internet connection from the service provider and takes full responsibility for setting up the tunnels (described shortly) over which VPN ... [full story]

Currently, a plethora of approaches to creating VPNs exists, and, because of ongoing vigorous activity by standards bodies, you are apt to see methodologies continue to proliferate, at least in the midterm. Probably the most basic distinction among the several ... [full story]