Geostationary satellites offer virtual networks
For about a year, Celso Azevedo has been briefing potential government users, mostly military ones, about instant broadband networking via forthcoming geostationary satellites. Azevedo is president and chief executive officer of Astrolink International Ltd. of Bethesda, Md., a venture of Lockheed Martin Corp. that expects to begin launching new geostationary satellites in 2002.
FTS 2001 transition presents telecom upgrade opportunities
The government's move from decade-old FTS 2000 long-distance contracts to a new set of nonmandatory contracts will give agencies a chance to upgrade their telecommunications systems and still have enough money for new services, said Sandra Bates, deputy commissioner of the General Services Administration's Federal Technology Service. But vendors will have to move fast because the money for upgrades won't last, said FTS Commissioner Dennis J. Fischer. None of the proposals for using the federal budget
Defense plans buying push to spread DISN worldwide
The Defense Information Systems Network will span the Pacific through a transmission contract the Defense Department wants to award this summer, possibly followed by a similar contract for European services later in the year. DOD pegs the worth of the two contracts at roughly $10 billion. They are just two of more than a handful of communications buys the department has in the DISN pipeline.
Cabletron, Xylan add Gigabit Ethernet uplinks
Cabletron Systems Inc. and Xylan Corp. have added Gigabit Ethernet uplink capability to their SmartStack and OmniSwitch switch families. Cabletron gave the $3,995 SmartStack ELS100-24TXG high-density workgroup switch 24 Fast Ethernet ports and two Gigabit Ethernet uplinks. The ELS100-24TXG does wire-speed switching and accommodates Web or Cabletron Spectrum management, RMON standards-based remote monitoring and port mirroring.
Tool unites Net reporting with phone call accounting
A new network accounting tool from Telemate Software Inc. of Atlanta integrates Internet usage reporting with telephone call accounting. "The federal government long ago bought into the fact that it has to control telephone use," marketing director Kent Jones said. Jones said Telemate's bread-and-butter business has been three generations of software to extract log data from agency private branch exchanges for usage reports and billing.
GSA predicts smooth cutover to FTS 2001
The government's telecommunications chiefs are predicting a smooth transition from FTS 2000 services to new long-haul communications providers, despite delays by many agencies in setting plans for new comm services. "I'm very confident we'll get through this in good shape," Federal Technology Services commissioner Dennis J. Fischer said last month.
NIH revs up supercomputer
The National Institutes of Health is cranking up its homegrown LOBOS supercomputer to Gigabit Ethernet rates to connect hundreds of nodes in the massively parallel system. LOBOS, which stands for lots of boxes on shelves, is a Beowulf-class supercomputer built in-house in 1997 to do molecular modeling for the Computational Biophysics Section of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. Like other Beowulf-class machines, it consists of off-the-shelf desktop computers strung together to share large computing
Ohio VA centers call on videoconferencing system
Veterans Affairs Department medical centers in Ohio expect immediate returns when their new asynchronous transfer mode WAN begins to carry voice, video and data. "We estimate we could save $600,000 to $700,000 a year in staff travel time by having a videoconferencing system," said Hank Rappaport, chief information officer for Ohio's Veterans Information Systems Network.
NerveCenter quiets alarms, tackles problems
A new version of the NerveCenter network management tool from Seagate Software, a subsidiary of Seagate Technology Inc. of Scotts Valley, Calif., suppresses redundant alarms from downstream devices, and it automatically fixes some problems by itself. Product manager Brett C. Cooper said the downstream alarm suppression feature helps small network administration staffs by fixing up to 80 percent of problems without their intervention.
Library goes online bit by bit
After digitizing about 1.5 million items from its special collections for the National Digital Libraries program, the Library of Congress continues to process other items for Web access at the rate of about 1 million files a year. In spite of the experience gained in preserving old items by reducing them to bits, each collection still presents new difficulties.
USPS gains lots of knowledge, if not sales, as smart-card pilot concludes
Four post offices on Manhattan's Upper West Side rang up only about $51,000 in smart-card sales during a one-year bank-sponsored pilot [GCN, June 22, 1998, Page 40]. But the Postal Service did gain a wealth of information. "We were not one of the merchants who were disappointed," said Terry Carter, USPS assistant treasurer for payment technologies. "We didn't go into it because we expected to get a significant amount of business, but more for the data. Based
High-bandwidth backbone handles Texas-size Internet traffic
Internet traffic heads for Abilene this week. The newly launched high-bandwidth Abilene backbone for Internet 2, together with the National Science Foundation's very-high-performance Backbone Network Service, will foster growth of the government's Next Generation Internet. "Since Internet 2 is all about next-generation applications, you have to have a heterogeneous network to test them on," said Greg Wood, communications director for Internet 2.
IP gains support as sole network protocol
Network traffic is shifting from mostly voice to mostly data. The Internet Protocol is on the verge of communications dominance, based on the product demonstrations and sessions at the ComNet conference in Washington last month. As John Chambers, president and chief executive officer of Cisco Systems Inc. of San Jose, Calif., said: Who wants or needs any network protocol except IP?
Bell Labs pushes gigabit wireless link as a way to boost throughput fourfold
High-powered, fiber-optic amplifiers can transmit up to 2.5 Gbps over distances as far as 1.5 miles without wires. That is a fourfold throughput increase over current commercial wireless products, which are limited to 622 Mbps and short wavelengths. The new amplifiers boost power output tenfold, so that the longer wavelengths of fiber-optic transmissions can also work for point-to-point wireless, said Jim Auborn, head of communications technology for Bell Labs, the R&D arm of Lucent Technologies Inc.
Combining voice and data traffic is cost-efficient, FEMA says
FEMA has been testing voice-over-data products for disaster field offices in the Caribbean and the southern United States since the summer. "The whole experience is very promising," said Bill Anderson, team leader in the Development and Implementation Branch of FEMA's Information Technology Division. "The cost benefit is impressive."
IRS thinks it has the answer
The IRS has upgraded its Telephone Routing Interactive System to prepare 36 customer service sites for the year 2000 and handle a record number of calls this tax season. The service installed new hardware and software and ported 18 applications between June and November last year to avoid interference with its busiest season.
Group yet to reach consensus on setting new Net naming policies
ICANN's chairwoman Esther Dyson says a consensus on domain names will give registrars more power in the long run. Internet leaders gathered in Washington last month to hammer out management policies for the vast Domain Name System under the Internet's new governing body. A Domain Name Supporting Organization (DNSO), the key to Net privatization, will be one of three new policy groups formed to advise the board of the Internet Corp.
Online service demands will drive outsourcing, futurist says
CHAPEL HILL, N.C.—James Canton thinks he has seen the future of government, and it is outsourced. Citizens accustomed to online consumer services will demand the same convenience from government agencies, said Canton, president of the Institute for Global Futures, a San Francisco think tank. But government cannot afford the time and money to develop information technology resources to satisfy them, he said.
System sells stats on demand
Stat-USA, the Commerce Department's fee-funded statistics retailer, has put up an online newsstand that lets customers buy individual documents through a third-party transaction service. "As far as we can tell, we're the first agency to use this kind of system," Stat-USA director Ken Rogers said.
Digital Lava offers agencies another option in video publishing
Digital Lava Inc. of Los Angeles is aiming a new release of its video publishing software at the federal market. The first version of its VideoVisor desktop viewer, released in 1996, found few federal customers, chief executive officer Joshua D.J. Sharfman said. But he expects the new release, called vPrism Publisher, to do better, especially in the Defense Department. He said DOD has "a huge training burden" to deliver to many locations over various kinds of
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