Corporation’s networks today are expanding exponentially but, more importantly, today’s networks are the backbone and heart of a companies’ ability to perform its day-to-day business. When network failures occur, businesses cannot operate, revenues are affected, and loss of credibility/customer experience can be catastrophic. Maintaining a consistent high level of service availability drives greater customer satisfaction, it builds greater credibility, that in turn creates greater revenues by ma...

The following blog post is by Steve Brown, the director of product marketing for Network Instruments, a business unit of JDSU. The management of IT resources has changed significantly over the past several years. With the implementation of cloud, unified communications (UC), and Big Data initiatives, locating the source of application or service delivery issues has become increasingly complex. As a result, the network team often functions as a first responder, ensuring the continued and uninterr...

Ixia is proud to announce the new Ixia Net Optics iBypass 3 Switch. This switch sets a new standard for flexibility, efficiency, and usability in copper bypass switching by supporting up to eight bypass switches in 1U – 4 times the density of our last gigbabit copper bypass switch. In addition to space efficiency, the iBypass 3 achieves class-leading power savings of 48% over the last generation of bypass switch! Ixia bypass switches provide a permanent and trouble-free access port for in-line n...

Virtualization continues to be an important data center success story. This technology has reduced physical plant hardware footprints, power costs, and cooling costs – significantly improving the total cost of ownership for the data center. At the same time, however, virtualization technology has also introduced a set of problems. These problems have decreased the visibility into what is happening within the virtual network, and can be summarized as follows: Lack of visibility hides potential se...

Canadian triple-play cableco Cogeco says it will consider launching a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) service if the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) implements stricter regulation regarding wholesale access to the infrastructure of national mobile network operators Rogers, Telus and Bell. As reported by Reuters, Cogeco’s CEO Louis Audet said that he hoped for new regulations to encourage MVNOs, in a statement to the press ahead of CRTC hearings on wholes...

Telecoms group Bell Canada Enterprises (BCE) and its subsidiary Bell Aliant yesterday announced in a press release the initial results of BCE’s offer to purchase all Bell Aliant’s outstanding publicly held common shares and to exchange all outstanding Bell Aliant preferred shares. BCE revealed in July that it would buy out all minority shareholders in Bell Aliant for a total consideration of approximately CAD3.95 billion (USD3.68 billion); sellers will receive cash and BCE common equity. 81.2% a...

New Features & Improvements: WiFi: Enforce licensing for 802.11AC NICs. LANforge will now only allow WiFi stations to be used if there is an 80211AC license key for the wiphy device. Customers that have previously purchased 802.11AC should request a new license from their sales contact before upgrading to LANforge 5.2.13. There will be no charge for the new key in this case. Improve Layer-3 UDP performance, especially with smaller packets. Testing shows about double the number of packet...

Optimal Visibility and Control of Your Data Center Ixia’s portfolio provides complete network visibility into physical and virtual networks, improves network security and optimizes monitoring tool performance. The Anue NTO ensures that each monitoring tool gets exactly the right data needed for analysis. This improves the way you manage your data center and maximizes return on investment. What Our Customers Say “The Anue NTO makes my life easier. It makes complex data monitoring simple and allow...

The IVR is an integral part of any call center. Customers can call the center and get what they need without ever talking to a human, allowing agents greater availability to handle the more pressing calls. Yet despite their obvious advantages, most IVR systems aren’t perfect and can benefit from some improvements. How do you know when your IVR is due for some revamping? One of the best ways is to dial the number yourself. By putting yourself in the shoes of the customer, you’ll get to experience...

Russian-backed telecoms group Vimpelcom and its Egyptian-based subsidiary Global Telecom Holding (GTH) jointly announced today that they have agreed to sell all of their debt and equity interest in the Globalive group of companies in Canada, including Globalive Wireless Management Corp (Wind Canada), the operator of the Wind Mobile cellular network. Canada’s Globalive Capital (formerly AAL Holdings), the controlling shareholder of Wind Canada, and a group of investment funds are acquiring the en...

In our area of technology, we often think of our products in terms of how they compare to the rest of the products in the same market segment. Maybe we can highlight one facet of a unique feature and point out how nobody else offers it – or at least not in that way. It is tempting to compare features line-by-line when you have competitors who offer products that are generally similar. But now I have the opportunity to talk about a market where nobody else has gone. Ixia can show something that i...

Quebec-based quadruple-play cableco and mobile operator Videotron has launched commercial services over its new 4G LTE network, four years to the day since launching its original 3G cellular network. In its press release Videotron announced that its LTE mobile broadband service reaches nearly 90% of Quebec’s population and supports speeds of up to 150Mbps, with data packages aimed at consumers and businesses. The Quebecor subsidiary has rolled out its LTE 2100MHz network in an infrastructure bui...

When it comes to ensuring consistent VoIP quality, what you don’t know can hurt you. Surprise changes to the network can leave end users unhappy and administrators scratching their heads. Even the smallest configuration and settings changes can have the potential to immediately and adversely impact applications. They can also be difficult to troubleshoot. To locate the source of any VoIP problem, it’s important to understand how critical changes in configuration, codecs, and user behavior can ki...

Canadian cableco Shaw Communications has completed the purchase of US-based data centre provider ViaWest for USD830 million plus USD370 million debt from private equity firm Oak Hill Capital Partners and other shareholders, following the agreement announced at the end of July. ViaWest, based in Denver, Colorado, operates 27 data centres in eight markets in the western US, with around 1,300 mainly mid-sized company clients, and will continue to operate as a standalone entity. ‘The ViaWest acquisi...

In April 2010, Network Instruments® announced the availability of Observer Infrastructure (OI), an integral element of their Observer® performance management solution, which complements their primary packet-oriented network and application performance monitoring products with an infrastructure viewpoint. An evolutionary replacement for Network Instruments Link Analyst™, OI has been significantly expanded and includes network infrastructure device health monitoring, IP SLA active testing, NBAR an...

A pre-eminent financial services firm provides products for customers around the world. Dedicated to serving clients’ financial needs‚ the firm is committed to delivering the best customer experience possible. Its commitment doesn’t stop with clients‚ but extends to improving the lives of individuals in communities around the world. A Business Challenge The customer was interested in implementing a web services-based self-service platform to bring together web services and IP telephony in all of...

IT needs end-to-end visibility, meaning tool access to any point in the physical and virtual network, and it has to be scalable and easy to manage, says Jason Echols, IXIA Networking is a rapidly evolving and changing landscape. We've quickly moved from parsing bits and bytes from workstation to workstation to providing powerful applications and services to millions of consumers. Speed and bandwidth requirements have grown exponentially, new traffic types appear daily, and now a functioning netw...

There is a common issue I deal with when speaking to end users trying to monitor applications. This confusion is partially created by vendors who would like to position themselves in the hot APM market, yet they clearly don’t enable performance monitoring. These vendors are slowly starting to correct the messaging, but many have poor market understanding, and continue to confuse buyers. There are two types of monitoring technologies, one is availability monitoring and the other performance monit...

The Company A worldwide technology company operating in more than 170 countries is focused on helping people apply technology in meaningful ways to their businesses, personal lives and communities. With R&D investments of almost a billion US dollars, the company is able to offer a complete technology product portfolio to the market. The ultimate goal of this market leader is to offer products, services and solutions that are high tech, low cost and deliver the best customer experience. The c...

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is perhaps the most profound paradigm shift facing the networking industry. In carrier networks, proven functions such as switching, routing, firewall, and other security elements migrate from proven hardware platforms to unproven virtualized servers controlled by software to gain efficiency and flexibility. Carriers worldwide agree on the need and vision for virtualization, but may still struggle to quantify the benefits, understand practical migration ste...