News in Networking: Australia Internet Woes, VMware’s Deal, and NFV at BCE

This week’s top story picks from the Kentik team.

This week we learned Australia invested $36 billion (USD) to modernize its broadband. But that’s not working, according to The New York Times, which reports on the country’s crawling internet speeds. Not crawling this week is VMware, which swooped up mobile app intelligence startup Apteligent for more analytics capabilities for its customers. Meanwhile, over in Austin, Light Reading’s annual Big Communications Event (BCE) is taking place. That’s where BT talked about the challenges of NFV. 

Here are those headlines and more:

• • How Australia Bungled Its $36 Billion High-Speed Internet Rollout (The New York Times) Forget the “down under” jokes. Australia is trying to figure out how to dig its way up and out of an internet speed slump. The country ranks No. 51 in terms of internet speeds, according to Akamai, despite its $36 billion (USD) investment to modernize broadband. Australia’s internet speeds are slower than developing economies like Kenya and Thailand.
  • App Analytics Company Apteligent Acquired by VMware (TechCrunch) VMware this week announced it’s acquiring mobile app intelligence startup Apteligent, the company previously known as Crittercism. According to TechCrunch, “VMware will be able to provide a more robust set of capabilities to its mobile analytics customers.”
  • NFV Woes Could Be Fixed With Service Models, BT Suggests (Light Reading) Happening in Austin this week is Light Reading’s Big Communications Event, where BT’s chief network architect, Neil McRae, where base suggested, “Having a common, base-level service model would make life easier for telcos by standardizing the drab, ordinary parts of a service. Carriers could still fine-tune the services to their liking, and they could also differentiate in the way they stitch services together.”
  • Why SDN, DevOps don’t share automated network missions (TechTarget) How does SDN and DevOps fit together? Do they share the same goals? According to one network engineer “Comparing the goals of DevOps and SDN in terms of automation as interchangeable fails to understand the point of a software-defined network.”
  • A Netflix Performance Engineer Explains His Job (Brendan Gregg’s Blog) Ever wonder what it’s like to be a performance engineer for the single largest source of peak downstream Internet traffic in the U.S.? Check out Netflix performance engineer Brendan Gregg’s latest blog post for “a day in the life.”
  • HPE Unveils Computer Built for the Era of Big Data (Press Release) If you want to buy a computer built for big data, talk to HPE. This week they introduced “the world’s largest single-memory computer.” According to their press release, the prototype contains 160 terabytes of memory, and the company expects the architecture to scale to a nearly-limitless pool of memory.