Blog

M2M applications represent a significant growth opportunity for mobile operators and service providers. Increasingly, service providers are entering the M2M market with innovative vehicle tracking and logistics solutions, leveraging their core competencies in mobility and telemetry.

According to a recent article in the Financial Times , the cost of cyber security attacks on British Businesses has soared by as much as 200% in the past 12 months. Criminals are actively targeting corporate assets such as IPR and customer databases.

The Diameter signalling storm will is expected to become a reality. The generally accepted solution is to add specialist routers to the network. These routers will perform load balancing and filtering tasks to ensure that messages are routed to the correct destination and that there is a fail-safe architecture in place.

The proposed European Directive “concerning measures to ensure a high common level of network and information security across the [European] Union” quite rightly places much emphasis on issues of user security and privacy. It states that “a secure information-sharing infrastructure will be put in place to allow for the exchange of sensitive and confidential information”.

National and International organisations are taking a keen interest in the growing issue of cyber security. There have been numerous reports of threats to commercial and private organisations and, recently, the EU launched a plan to help “protect open internet and online freedom and opportunity”.

Once we have caught our hare, we need to know what to do with it. That’s not as easy as it sounds. Buried in the flows of data that we capture and accumulate are the records of patterns and events. They have meaning – in many cases, the meaning is obvious, but in many others, it is not easily apparent. We have to sift through the data, interpreting it, sorting out events that demand our attention now and assembling pictures that enable us make better-informed decisions.

In 1994, leading philosopher Pierre Levy suggested that the publication of Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopedie in the 18th Century signalled the "end of an area in which a single human being was able to comprehend the totality of knowledge". It has also been said that Leibnitz was the last man to know everything, which is surely arguable.

As we noted in an earlier post, a significant proportion of network traffic will be based on the Diameter protocol. It's already there, but it's going to grow dramatically with the on-going transition to all-IP networks. Read more

SIP has rightly captured much of the attention in emerging NGN networks. It's at the heart of connectivity in the IMS and many other network elements. But SIP is designed for session control – voice, media and data. It is not designed for conveying complex information that is required to authenticate users and determine what they can do. Read more

The move to 4G LTE signals the advent of the all IP network. This means that control plane, session layer and transport will all be based on IP. As we discussed, this heralds significant growth in the deployment and use of Diameter signalling. Read more