Network Cabling Services Telecom used by NSA in Spying

Spiegel quoted NSA papers dating from February and labelled “top secret” and “not for foreigners” describing the agency’s success in spying on the so-called Sea-Me-We 4 undersea telecommunication cable system.

According to the website of the project Sea-Me-We 4 “the South East Asia-Middle East-West Europe 4 project is a next generation submarine cable system linking South East Asia to Europe via the Indian Sub-Continent and Middle East.

NSA terms this “interdiction.” Agents divert shipments to secret warehouses, carefully open the packages, install the software and/or hardware, and send them on their way.

The project aims to take these regions to the forefront of global communication by significantly increasing the bandwidth and global connectivity of users along its route between Singapore and France.” says report.

The massive bundle of fibre optic cables originates near the southern French city of Marseille and links Europe with north Africa and the Gulf states, continuing through Pakistan and India to Malaysia and Thailand.

Former CIA Edward Snowden’s documents have uncovered a secret NSA hacking unit which delivered the US some of its most significant intelligence information in recent years

source: www.freedistrict.com

growing internet use in Africa to lift contribution to economies

internet services have experienced exponential growth in Africa, thanks to the significant investments made in building backbone infrastructure and the roll-out of 3G networks. This has allowed millions of Africans to connect to the internet for the first time.

McKinsey said the continent was now in a better position in terms of international bandwidth, as capacity had been added faster than peak demand had grown.

According to the report, only 16% of the continent’s 1-billion people are online, but the take-up is rising rapidly as mobile networks are built and as the cost of internet-capable devices continues to fall.

More than 720-million Africans have cellphones, about 167-million already use the internet and 52-million are on Facebook.

"The internet is a catalyst for economic growth," said McKinsey director and co-author of the report Saf Yeboah-Amankwah. "In China, India and Brazil, it has contributed more than 10% of total GDP growth over the past five years.

"Its impact in Africa to date has been much smaller, but is likely to accelerate in the coming decade and could have a transformative effect on the continent’s development."

source: www.bdlive.co

SA,s 3G world class , fixed broadband poor : Naspers CEO

Naspers CEO Koos Bekker said that while South Africa’s mobile broadband (3G) services are world class, fixed broadband access remains poor.

Speaking to Talk Radio 702’s Bruce Whitfield, Bekker said that South Africa’s Internet access diverges between mobile phones and PCs.

“Our 3G [mobile broadband] systems are as good as we get anywhere in the world,” said Bekker, adding that fixed broadband [used on a PC] has a problem with a lack of bandwidth.

The bandwidth restraints of fixed broadband access in SA, said Bekker, has a consequence on their pay-TV operations.

Bekker said in an interview with Money web that they are forced to “fake the Internet” using their new DStv Explora decoder to make it possible for users to catch up on news or sporting events when it suits them.

“But we can fake the Internet a bit by putting it on satellite, loading it down into the PVR and then offering it to you as if it were the internet.”

source: www.mybroadband.co

multiple input multiple output technology

in radio communications, multiple input multiple output is the use of multiple antennnas at both the transmitter and receiver to improve communication performance.

       This technology is one of the several forms of smart antenna technology. This technology is used in wireless communications because it offers significant increases in data throughput without additional bandwidth or power requirements.

Working: it acheives this goal by spreading the same total transmit power over the antennas to achieve an array gain that improves the spectral efficiency and to achieve diversity gain that improves fading.

Because of these factors this is used in latest technologies like Wi-Fi , 4G, 3GPP long term evolution, Wi Max and HSPA+.

MIMO can be sub divided into three main categories:

Precoding

Spatial multiplexing

Diversity coding

PRECODING : it is a multistream beamforming. It is considered as all spatial processing that occurs at the transmitter. In single stream beamforming , the same signal is emitted from each of the transmit antenna with appropiate phase and gain such that signal power is maximed at the receiver input. The benefit of this is to increase the received signal gain by making ignals emitted from different antennas , adding them constructively and to reduce multipath fading effect. In line of sight propagation, it results in well defined directional patterns.  When the receiver has multiple antennas , the transmit beamforming cannot simultaneously maximise the signal levelat all of the receive antennas. There is a requirement of channel state information at the transmitter and the receiver.

SPATIAL MULTIPLEXING : this requires MIMO antenna configuration.  In this, a high rate signal is split into multiple lower rate streams and each stream is transmitted from a different transmit antenna in the same frequency channel. If these signals arrive at the receiver antenna array with sufficiently different spatial signatures and the receiver has accurate CSI  , it can separate these streams into parallel channels. This technique is very effective for increasing channel capacity and higher signal to noise ratios. This can be used without CSI at the transmitter but can be combined with precoding if CSI is available.

DIVERSITY CODING  :  these techniques are used when there is no channel knowledge at the transmitter. In this, a single stream is transmitted, but the signal is coded using techiques called spac time coding. The signal is transmitted from each of transmit antenas with full or near orthogonal coding. Diversity coding can be combined with spatial multiplexing when some channel knowledge is available at the transmitter.

opera sofware ASA : MTN group renews agreement with opera software

Opera Mini is a mobile web browser that compresses webpages to as little as 10% of their initial size,which helps customers to save on data costs and network operators to save on bandwidth, thus enabling more people to access the mobile web.

In the past two years, MTN has rolled out a co-branded version of Opera Mini in 17 markets including Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, Sudan, Zambia, Uganda, Congo, Rwanda, Swaziland, Cameroon, Benin, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Afghanistan, Cyprus, Guinea and Yemen.

The MTN co-branded Opera Mini browser has seen phenomenal uptake since it was first launched, with its user base more than doubling in the past 12 months alone.

MTN and Opera have worked together to promote the co-branded browser via different campaigns in all regions in which it has been rolled out. Opera has also partnered with local MTN operations to embed Opera Mini on devices sold by MTN.

Under the new agreement, Opera Mini remains available for new and existing MTN subscribers in each market, providing one-click access from the home page to services such as MTN Play and MTN Football.

According to MTN Group Chief Commercial Officer, Pieter Verkade, "The renewed partnership with Opera Software will allow MTN customers to continue to have the best possible digital experience of the internet using their mobile devices, while accessing content in a fast and affordable way."

He adds that this is in line with MTN's vision to lead the way in bringing a bold new Digital World to its customers, as Opera Mini works on 3,000 handsets and does not require a 3G network to access the web, providing customers with a fast and functional web experience.

"Our relationship with MTN is a strategic one, and we look forward to building on the success we have had in the 17 MTN markets where Opera Mini has already been rolled out. Our goal with Opera Mini is to make the internet more accessible to people via mobile phones, as well as to increase the efficiency of operators in keeping up with an ever-growing mobile web demand," says Lars Boilesen

source : www.4traders.com

Spread spectrum technology

This is a technique in which a telecommunication signal is transmitted on a bandwidth considerably larger than the frequency content of the original information. Frequency hopping is a basic modulation technique used in spread spectrum signal transmission.

Spread-spectrum telecommunications is a signal structuring technique that employs direct sequence, frequency hopping, or a hybrid of these, which can be used for multiple access and/or multiple functions. This technique decreases the potential interference to other receivers while achieving privacy. Spread spectrum generally makes use of a sequential noise-like signal structure to spread the normally narrow band information signal over a relatively wide band (radio) band of frequencies. The receiver correlates the received signals to retrieve the original information signal. Originally there were two motivations: either to resist enemy efforts to jam the communications (anti-jam, or A J), or to hide the fact that communication was even taking place, sometimes called low probability of intercept (L P I).

Spread-spectrum clock generation (S S C G) is used in some synchronous digital systems, especially those containing microprocessors, to reduce the spectral density of the electromagnetic interference (E M I) that these systems generate. A synchronous digital system is one that is driven by a clock signal and, because of its periodic nature, has an unavoidably narrow frequency spectrum. In fact, a perfect clock signal would have all its energy concentrated at a single frequency (the desired clock frequency) and its harmonics. Practical synchronous digital systems radiate electromagnetic energy on a number of narrow bands spread on the clock frequency and its harmonics, resulting in a frequency spectrum that, at certain frequencies, can exceed the regulatory limits for electromagnetic interference (e.g. those of the FCC in the United States, J E I T A in Japan and the I E C in Europe).

Spread-spectrum clocking avoids this problem by using one of the methods previously described to reduce the peak radiated energy and, therefore, its electromagnetic emissions and so comply with electromagnetic compatibility (E M C) regulations. 

It has become a popular technique to gain regulatory approval because it requires only simple equipment modification. It is even more popular in portable electronics devices because of faster clock speeds and increasing integration of high-resolution LCD displays into ever smaller devices. Since these devices are designed to be lightweight and inexpensive, traditional passive, electronic measures to reduce E M I, such as capacitors or metal shielding, are not viable. Active E M I reduction techniques such as spread-spectrum clocking are needed in these cases.

However, spread-spectrum clocking, like other kinds of dynamic frequency change, can also create challenges for designers. Principal among these is clock/data misalignment, or clock skew.