Category: News digest

WebEx Added to Smartphones at Mobile World Congress

WebexCisco WebEx became more useful than ever this week with the news that it was being extended to work with a range of business smartphones.

The announcement, at Mobile World Congress, means users will be able to join Cisco WebEx Meeting Center Web and audio conferences on smartphones including the BlackBerry Bold, Curve 8900 and Storm from RIM, the Nokia Eseries and Nseries phones, and the Samsung Blackjack II.

To use, you just launch Cisco WebEx Meeting Center through your smartphone browser and you get integrated audio and Web conferencing over 3G or a combination of 2G and Wi-Fi. You can join scheduled meetings and view presentations, applications and desktops with live annotations.

There is also a nice function on WebEx whereby a host can send meeting invites via Short Message Service and a recipient can join simply by texting ‘1’ back. Cisco WebEx smartphone support starts in April this year.

Read the full post on blogs.cisco.com…

Cisco makes the case for WiMAX at Mobile World Congress

Cisco WiMAXThere is a big buzz at Mobile World Congress this year around Long Term Evolution (LTE) radio area networks. This is a radio access technology which Cisco fully supports and which promises to bring much greater speed and bandwidth to mobile networks.

Hang on, though. This is pretty much what was promised with WiMAX last year. So what has happened to 2008’s great hope for high-speed mobile access?

To help clarify the issue, Brett Galloway, Senior Vice President for the Wireless and Security Technology Group at Cisco sat in on a round table hosted by Intel. And the answer, it would seem, is that both have a bright future—although possibly not at the same time.

According to the panel, LTE is still about five years away from production deployment.

Read the full post on blogs.cisco.com…

Network-based protection against denial-of-service-attacks

NetworkWorld News

A recent announcement by Verizon Business concerning an expanded suite of protection “in the cloud” from denial-of-service-attacks is a great example of services that should be provided within the service providers’ networks – something that we’ve been advocating for years.

Of course, there’s nothing new about denial-of-service-attacks. These attacks, which started primarily as “TCP SYN” attacks, basically are designed to disable a site – or even an entire network – by using up critical network resources with bogus traffic of some form.

Read the full article on networkworld.com…