Around The Industry:
The digital divide between England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales is narrowing as more homes connect to broadband. Broadband take-up in homes in England reached 45% by the end of 2006, while 42% of homes in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales had broadband, according to research from Ofcom. Two-thirds of the UK’s households were able to get broadband and phone services through local loop unbundling (LLU) by the end of 2006 – compared with only two-fifths of homes able to connect by LLU at the end of 2005. Interestingly, Less than three-tenths of UK households (29%) opted to bundle services from a single telecoms provider in 2006.:
It will be years before the much-hyped blending of services that run seamlessly over both fixed and cell phone networks will allow consumers to communicate freely on any device, industry executives say. Operators have trouble finding customers for combined deals offering fixed and mobile services, which are complicated to set up and lack choice in handsets, industry executives said at a convergence conference in Amsterdam. Many operators that offer such a service see it simply as a way of binding customers closer to their fixed-line networks, and are reluctant to offer additional services that span other devices and networks.
Comsys Communication and Signal Processing, a leader in wireless baseband solutions, announced that its ComMAX(TM) processor has been awarded the title of ‘Best WIMAX Product or Service’ at the Wireless Broadband Innovation Awards ceremony in London. ComMAX is a flexible multimode OFDMA baseband processor that enables service continuity between cellular and Mobile WiMAX (IEEE 802.16e) networks. The winners of this year’s Wireless Broadband Innovation Awards were selected from over 170 qualified entries by an independent panel of world-leading experts, and the awards were announced in front of more than 400 industry professionals at a ceremony associated with The Wireless Event.
Denver-based telcom Qwest is facing opposition from city council members in its attempt to bring IPTV to Broomfield, a Colorado community. Local officials have qualms about IPTV’s availability, which is limited to areas with a reported higher likelihood of affording the service. They also believe IPTV isn’t quite ready to cater to even those customers, and are dissatisfied with the slow roll-out of its high speed DSL service in the area.
Carol Ellison reorts for MuniWireless: “While EarthLink re-evaluates its position in the muni market, Azulstar is quietly upping the ante. Yorke Rhodes II, Azulstar’s new CEO states, “We are looking at Azulstar as a viable, national broadband player that can be very easily propelled into the same echelon as companies like Earthlink.” As I’ve said before, the mistake that many headline writers make is in making EarthLink the sole barometer of the market. In many ways, Azulstar and other smaller WISPs are more representative. Where EarthLink faces the challenge of what do to about its rapidly eroding base of dial-up customers, Azulstar (and other companies that are not saddled with converting customers from yesterday’s technologies) can focus its energies on the specific challenges of the deployments at hand.
Mike Masnick writes for TechDirt: “As the Verizon/Vonage patent trial moves onto the next phase, Vonage is clearly trying to use the Supreme Court’s new ruling on patent obviousness to get Verizon’s patents tossed out. However, Verizon is claiming that this is unfair and that since Vonage didn’t bring up these issues at the lower court level it can’t use the new obviousness test in the appeals court either. It is true that the appeals court is supposed to focus on the arguments that were made at the lower court, but the situation gets trickier when the fundamental rules have changed in between the cases. Still, it’s amusing to have Verizon claiming that Vonage should have known about this new obviousness ruling before the Supreme Court even made the ruling.”
The GSM technology global coverage footprint has provided the foundation for UMTS/HSDPA to become the most widely deployed 3G technology and market leader. According to Informa‘s World Cellular Information Service quarterly subscriber reports, UMTS/HSDPA, with 117 million subscribers, is commercially available through twice as many operators as other 3G technologies – 167 operators in 69 countries, compared to 71 operators in 44 countries with CDMA EV-DO. Of the 172 million true mobile broadband 3G subscribers worldwide as of 1Q 2007, 68% use UMTS/HSDPA. Worldwide, the greatest quarterly growth of UMTS/HSDPA took place in the US and Canada, where UMTS experienced an unprecedented 614% growth, rocketing from 350,000 subscribers to 2.5 million subscribers in three months ending March 2007.
Global shipments of DSL equipment in the first quarter increased 5% sequentially to a record 25 million ports, according to market research firm Dittberner. However, North American shipments declined for the third quarter in a row and will continue to decline due to the slowdown in AT&T’s buildout, Verizon’s shift to Fiber-to-the-Home and the absence of alternative service providers. Market consolidation continues and will likely speed up if DSL subscriber growth slows, as the firm expects.
Millions of broadband customers across Britain are being penalised just for living in the ‘wrong’ area, reveals uSwitch.com. The independent price comparison and switching service said depending on where someone lives can mean they can pay a minimum of £10 a month more for broadband services. It named internet service providers (ISPs) such as TalkTalk, Sky, UK Online and Virgin Media as guilty of differentiating both the price and speed of their broadband services for some areas in the UK. This ‘two-tier’ pricing system is particularly evident in the more sparsely populated rural areas because these customers often fall outside an ISPs local loop unbundling (LLU) network.
SecurityBits:
Microsoft concluded an investigation into a potential IIS 6.0 flaw that researchers said may lead to a DoS attack and which researchers said “definitely” allows attackers to access special DOS devices (COM1 in this case). The verdict: The claims are wrong, the public proof of concept code doesn’t take advantage of an IIS 6.0 vulnerability, and the code in question, although it claims to use IIS 6.0, actually uses ASP.NET. Posters on the BugTraq mailing list maintained that the flaw could be used to read data from a device attached to COM1—a PC’s first serial port. The flaw can also prevent another application from accessing the port, since access to ports is exclusive, according to a poster with the handle “3APA3A.”
Antivirus vendor Panda Software released a Web-based product, Malware Radar, that it claims will spot malware that normally goes undetected by traditional security programs. The company said it has developed a new methodology for detecting malware that’s embedded in Malware Radar called Collective Intelligence. As an online, security-as-a-service feature, Collective Intelligence can detect ten times more virus files than traditional products, Panda claimed. Panda said Malware Radar is designed to complement, not replace, existing client-side antivirus software offered by vendors like Symantec and others.
Malware miscreants have created the first worm targeting Skype that’s also capable over other instant messaging networks, such as MSN and ICQ. The unnamed worm poses as a chat message linking to a website, as with other example of Skype-spreading malware before it. Users tricked by this simple ruse will find themselves infected by the Stration worm, a mass mailer that also attempts to foil attempts to remove it by blocking access to security-related websites, and other items of malware. The twist comes via an attempt by VXers to hedge their bets. One of the files dropped onto infected PCs checks to see if a number of different instant messaging programs are installed. FaceTime speculates that the cross-network IM worm is probably the work of the same VXers who created early Skype worm. The latest IM malware menace once again emphasises the importance for users to think before they click.
A Reg reader has produced screen shots that demonstrate a powerful phishing technique that’s able to spoof eBay, PayPal and other top web destinations without triggering antiphishing filters in IE 7 or Norton 360. Based on the description, Roger Thompson, who tracks web exploits for Exploit Prevention Labs, guesses those experiencing this attack have inadvertently installed an html injector. That means the victims’ browsers are, in fact, visiting the PayPal website or other intended URL, but that a dll file that attaches itself to IE is managing to read and modify the html while in transit.
Cisco Systems has released a security patch to fix vulnerabilities in a number of its products that are at risk of a DoS attack. The vulnerabilities are found in a third-party cryptographic library in Cisco IOS, Cisco IOS XR, Cisco PIX and ASA Security Appliances, Cisco Firewall Module and Cisco Unified CallManager products, according to a security advisory issued by Cisco. The vulnerabilities can be exploited without a valid username or password, given some of the older Cisco products have the cryptographic library set to default. And while attackers may be able to launch a DOS attack, they are not known to gain access to information that has already been encrypted, Cisco noted. Although the vulnerabilities affect a wide range of Cisco products, no exploits have yet surfaced.
Hardware, Software, and other TidBytes:
