MCI takes 2nd FTS 2001 pact
The General Services Administration this month awarded its second and final FTS 2001 long-distance networking contract to MCI WorldCom Inc. of Jackson, Miss. The contract will slash voice rates to less than 1 cent per minute in its final year. "We think we achieved the lowest prices in history, even lower than what we talked about in December" when Sprint Corp. won the first-round contract, said Dennis J. Fischer, commissioner
First of two FTS 2000 contracts goes to Sprint
The multibillion-dollar FTS 2001 first-round contract that the General Services Administration awarded last month to Sprint Corp. promises voice and data savings of up to 60 percent, or $3.8 billion, over eight years. Under the decade-old FTS 2000 contract, Sprint has had 24 percent of federal voice and data business. AT&T Corp. has had 76 percent.
Labs sport collaborative look
Scientists who move into new National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration laboratories in Boulder, Colo., will find a state-of-the-art asynchronous transfer mode network waiting for them. "Modern research lives or dies by its network and communications capabilities," said Britt Bassett, network manager for NOAA's Boulder labs. "There's a lot of collaborative research going on here that has been hindered" by inadequate network links between buildings scattered across the area.
DOD supports Unix messaging with user agent
Nexor Inc. has released its Messageware Defender for Motif, a military-grade user agent for Unix platforms that are part of the Defense Department's Defense Message System. Defender now is the only mail client that supports military messaging standards on Unix workstations, company officials said. Nexor's Messageware server is already certified for DMS use, but the Defender client has yet to undergo interoperability testing, said Tony Roadknight, senior technical consultant for Nexor of Gaithersburg, Md. He said Defender's
Survey: Legal liability of Web access a top concern
The No. 1 concern for managers who use Internet access management tools is legal liability, followed closely by employee productivity, according to a recent survey by NetPartners Internet Solutions Inc. of San Diego. "Government buyers are less concerned about legal liability than their private counterparts, but both still rate legal liability as the top concern," said Bryan Wampler, NetPartners' public relations manager.
GSA's technology unit unveils '98 revenues
After a year at the helm of the General Services Administration's Federal Technology Service, Dennis J. Fischer still calls himself a recovering bean counter. He fell off the wagon during a year-end briefing last week, producing preliminary figures for the agency's fiscal 1998 performance. FTS revenues increased 37.5 percent, from $2.5 billion to $3.4 billion—good numbers for an agency that supports itself through sales to government customers.
CellCase2 increases Secant's range of ATM encryption speeds
With the release of CellCase2, Secant Network Technologies Inc. of Research Triangle Park, N.C., says its line of virtual private networking products can now encrypt asynchronous transfer mode traffic at wire rates all the way from 1.5 Mbps to 155 Mbps. Earlier CellCase products secured WAN communications at T3 and OC-3 rates of 45 Mbps and 155 Mbps. The newest entry, introduced last month, covers T1 rates at the low end of the range.
First FTS 2001 award goes to Sprint | Breaking News
The General Services Administration on Dec. 18 awarded the first-round FTS 2001 contract for long-distance telecommunications services to Sprint Corp. The eight-year contract guarantees Sprint at least $750 million in revenue. A second round of bidding for a second FTS 2001 contract was set to begin immediately, and that award could come by mid-January, said Dennis J. Fischer, commissioner of GSA's Federal Technology Service, which will manage the contracts.
FTS users left hanging as AT&T scraps X.25
Come June, AT&T Corp.'s FTS 2000 Network A users will no longer be able to buy X.25 service. AT&T's imminent withdrawal from the X.25 market, coming at the height of year 2000 preparations, will force agencies on Network A to migrate to frame relay service from AT&T or to find other network providers that offer X.25 service.
1999: the year of computer security—maybe
What was hot in 1998? Security products. What will be hot in 1999? Security policies. Spending on network security worldwide this year will likely jump 53 percent from last year to $1.85 billion, according to DataQuest Inc. of San Jose, Calif. It is expected to grow to $2.98 billion next year and reach $5.18 billion by 2000.
Switch is on at NAVOCEANO
After many centuries on the seas, you might think the world's navies would have finished charting the oceans, but the job just keeps getting bigger. The Naval Oceanographic Office operates eight survey stations and gathers information from hundreds more remote sites around the world to track tides, temperatures and shifting shorelines.
3Com introduces high-speed storage network
3Com Corp.'s StorageConnect family, announced this month, joins an emerging market for storage area networks, or SANs. A Fibre Channel SAN works behind a LAN, connecting external storage devices to servers. The most common external storage configuration at present is a SCSI connection between a storage device and a single server. SAN will make a high-speed link among multiple servers and multiple storage devices, in effect creating a virtual data pool.
RealNetworks sees intranets as streaming media venue
When President Clinton's videotaped grand jury testimony was released in September, an estimated 2 million people watched it on desktop computers using viewers from RealNetworks Inc. of Seattle. Web news outlets such as ABCNews.com, Fox News, CNN and National Public Radio used the company's RealVideo to distribute the video over the Internet, giving RealNetworks what executive producer Mark Hall called its first near-cable-sized audience.
NIST upgrades to faster, more accessible backbone
The National Institute of Standards and Technology is upgrading its campus network in Gaithersburg, Md., to do all things for all users. NIST will maintain its old Fiber Distributed Data Interface backbone while migrating to asynchronous transfer mode, installing Gigabit Ethernet between switches, and accommodating a growing number of requests for adding switched Ethernet and Fast Ethernet to desktop PCs.
Treasury seeks smarter cards
The Treasury Department has completed a four-month Internet commerce pilot of smart cards and elliptic-curve cryptography in conjunction with the Secure Electronic Transaction (SET) specification. "It worked very well," said Gary Grippo, program manager for electronic money at Treasury's Financial Management Service. "We learned that elliptic-curve cryptography was more than 73 percent more efficient than the RSA [Data Security Inc.] mechanism."
Base updates its training LAN
The Training and Education Center at McGhee-Tyson Air National Guard Base in Knoxville, Tenn., is a fairly new facility with an up-to-date fiber backbone. But by 1997, its distributed learning network had become woefully inadequate. A shared Ethernet ran the Vines network operating system from Banyan Systems Inc. of Westborough, Mass., connecting desktop 486 PCs with 8M of RAM each.
Virtual private network products are the hot trend
ATLANTA—Virtual private networking over secured Internet connections was the hottest trend at last month's NetWorld+Interop trade show. At least 16 companies announced at least 24 VPN products. "Everybody here is selling some VPN product," said Dayton Semerjian, senior marketing director at Shiva Corp. of Bedford, Mass. Its three VPN announcements made the company attractive to Intel Corp., which announced an agreement to acquire Shiva last month.
FTS hustles to replace its long-distance service
FTS' Dennis Fischer says an FTS 2001 award is possible by "maybe early December." As the General Services Administration last week celebrated the FTS 2000 contract's 10-year run with representatives of AT&T Corp. and Sprint Corp., the agency's Federal Technology Service was scrambling to award an FTS 2001 long-distance replacement before FTS 2000 runs out Dec. 7.
New token-ring LANs close in on Fast Ethernet speeds
Token-ring LANs are following Fast Ethernet into the 100-Mbps range. Under the emerging High-Speed Token-Ring standard, Olicom USA Inc. of Plano, Texas, has introduced a 100-Mbps file server adapter and a switch uplink module. Both HSTR products will reduce congestion on LAN backbones and extend the life of aging token-ring networks, said Dan Jude, senior product marketing manager.
Secure voice server condenses telephone calls to save up to 80 percent bandwidth
TimePlex Federal Systems of Washington has designed a Secure Telephone Unit III Secure Voice Server to reduce by as much as 80 percent the bandwidth taken up by STU III telephone calls. The server converts the phone's analog output to a 9.6-Kbps digital signal that consumes less than one-fifth the capacity of a standard voice line. As many as five secure calls can travel over the line at once.
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