Bits: AT&Tâs Broadband Harvest Strategy
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The anticipated price war between cable and telecommunications companies over the price of Internet access has failed to materialize.
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Early Internet entrepreneurs envisioned a day when consumers would devour short bites of entertainment on their computer screens delivered over the Internet by fat broadband pipes. When the companies failed, executives blamed it on ...
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(InfoWorld) - Enterprise companies will soon begin offloading many of their network security responsibilities to telecommunications and Internet service providers and save vast amounts of time and money doing so, if AT&T has its way. Speaking to the assembled crowd at the IDC Security Forum in New York on Wednesday, Edward Amoroso, chief security officer for AT&T's services division, predicted that enterprises will begin adopting more "virtual" security capabilities from their ISPs and bandwidth providers in the coming years as those companies are better positioned to do battle with botnets, spam, and denial-of-service )DoS) threats. Based on the bandwidth-providers' existing abilities to see spikes in traffic that are tell-tale signs of botnet, spam, or other malware activity -- long before enterprises can see evidence of the attacks on their own -- Amoroso contends that companies will soon concede the process of fighting the threats and turn to companies such as AT&T for help. "We think that security at the perimeter should be virtual, which is a somewhat controversial concept, because a lot of time, effort, and career capital has already been spent securing the perimeter," Amoroso said. "But we think a lot of existing technologies there are running out of legs, and simply running firewalls at the gateway is no longer a valuable proposition." The United States government's Telecommunications act of 1996 prevents carriers from approaching customers and marketing services to them based on any trends they observe on the end users' network connections. However, the companies can already identify much of the spam and malware activity being carried out in the pipe, based on their massive infrastructure, and should be enlisted to help solve security issues, he said. For threats such as distributed DoS that can easily be thwarted upstream, the CIO said, it makes little sense for companies to continue to invest in new technologies and staff when the carriers could easily detect and snuff out the campaigns ahead of time. "How do you stop DDoS at the edge? The physics just don't make sense. When these attacks happen, the customers' routers will already be dead," said Amoroso. "We think the idea that the pipe should be dumb is strange; with spam accounting for 90 percent of all traffic on the e-mail pipe, we're delivering nothing but more attacks, malware, and junk. If people want us to keep doing that we can, but why would they want us to keep doing that when we can see it, scoop it, study it, and stop it?" Lest someone should contend that AT&T and other carriers are merely licking their chops at the prospect of adding pricey new security services to their products, the expert said security services should eventually become a set of non-optional capabilities included with the purchase of ISP and telephony services. Much as the carrier community focused on providing faster services in the 1980s and added tools to improve quality to their products in the 1990s, the CIO said that security services will become a de facto element of all the capabilities that the firms market. While early adopters are already paying a premium to use the security capabilities offered by carriers today, eventually the price should be blended into the packages of capabilities that companies buy from providers such as AT&T, the expert predicted. At the same time, AT&T and other carriers would have to sacrifice their existing businesses of selling firewall management and intrusion detection-type systems into enterprises, he said. But the move to push security tools to the bandwidth providers is one that has been made even more likely by the complexity of those technologies. "I think we'll come out of this decade thinking it was silly to have separate perimeter security systems, it doesn't make sense to build the network and overlay security as an afterthought," Amoroso said. "We have as large of a managed security services business as anyone, but this work is better off embedded in the pipeline." Emerging mobile and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services will also include integrated security capabilities that replace many of the systems being implemented to protect those technologies today, according to the AT&T CIO. "We can virtualize these things, and any carrier can do it; this is the direction that perimeter security is headed in. It's not a collision course, but rather something very pleasant, as finally there's something smooth and simple to solve these problems," he said. "It's absurd that all we hear today is that the carrier plays no role in all of this, that companies should do it at the edge. We know it's a lot of work, but we're already prepared to do it."
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By PULLAR-STRECKER Tom  TELECOM will install ADSL2+ Internet access equipment in 120 exchanges in Wellington, Auckland, Christchurch, Hamilton and Dunedin by the end of the year, tripling the maximum download speed of its copper broadband network.
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What could eventually resolve the value proposition for mainstream consumers to accept an incoming ultra-high-bandwidth pipeline into their homes is the ability of high-definition, on-demand video. But that will require a level of cooperation that competitors thus far have been unable to muster.
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Jon Oltsik says the explosion in broadband use forces a rethinking of Internet security. But a lethargic vendor response is not a promising harbinger.
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Avoiding the false economy trap Reg Tech Panel â¦
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Comparing Asta Funding to Portfolio Recovery Associates.
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Safend, an international provider of endpoint i
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A new device capable of detecting and throttling encrypted BitTorrent traffic hits the shelves. The game of cat and mouse between ISPs and BitTorrent users continues. In Monkey Bites.
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Throughput improvements to 200 kilobits per second (up from between 70 kbps and 135 kbps) noted by multiple users.
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Two years ago, Bob Frankston wrote Why Settle for Just 1%? while in the midst of his ramp-up as a Verizon FiOS customer. The question is still on the table. I'd like us to help answer it by re-phrasing the question: What could we, as Linux developers and users, do with fiber to our homes and businesses?
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The ground rules of the tests of Cisco and Avaya systems.
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Who needs fibre? An Aussie PhD student has developed an algorithm that he says can turbo charge an ordinary copper phone line to deliver downloads at 200Mbit/s.â¦
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A coalition of big technology companies wants to bring high-speed Internet access to consumers in a new way: over television airwaves. Key to the project is whether a device scheduled to be delivered to federal labs today lives up to its promise.
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A global summit aims to lay the groundwork for a new structure of internet governance. Participants, however, have very different visions for the future of broadband deployment, net telephony and other web technologies. By Wendy M. Grossman.
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Wireless broadband gets a boost with optimized EV-DO installations in several regions.