Tag: ethernet

Personal storage market was flat last year

Posted on February 13, 2015 by - News

storage75.7 million personal and entry level storage products shipped in 2014 and that means the market was essentially flat.

IDC estimated that annual shipment values fell 1.5 percent compared to 2013, with a value of $6.6 billion.

Personal stort age suffered from competition from public cloud providers and people started using online streaming more, said IDC.

The entry level market is largely dominated by vendors that don’t make hard drives but their share fell as much as 17.6 percent compared to the year before.

USB continues to be the choice for the personal and entry level storage market, while Ethernet is preferred for entry level market. Thunderbolt based devices fell by 5.7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2014, the first time it had showed a decline.

Devices with over four terabytes of storage now account for a third of all shipments in the quarter.

UCL claims optical fibre breakthrough

Posted on February 3, 2015 by - News

Jeremy Bentham auto icon at University College London - Wikimedia CommonsResearchers at University College London (UCL) claim to have discovered a new method of processing fibre optic signals.
And that, they say, could double the distance of data travelling error free through transatlantic cables.
Signals right now need to be boosted which can be difficult if the cables are 20,000 leagues beneath the sea.
But the technique, say the UCL boffins, mean that costs will be lower and will correct transmitted data if they’re corrupted or distorted on their way.
The scientists have eliminated interactions between optical channels and believe they can transmit error free data from 3,190 kilometres to 5,890 kilometres.
The researchers created a so-called “super channel”which consists of a set of frequencies that can be encoded using amplitude, phase and frequency. They coupled this with a high speed super receiver plus signal processing techniques they developed.
The next step is for the researchers to test this method on denser super channels used in digital cable TV, cable modems, and Ethernet connections.

 

Smartphones will win the day

Posted on December 8, 2014 by - News

smartphone-shoppingA report predicted that by 2018 over 50 percent of people will use either a smartphone or a tablet for all online activities.

Gartner said people will gradually move away from the PC as people use smartphnes and tablets more more.

Voice, gesture and other ways of communicating with devices online will be the rule of thumb, while 40 percent of enterprises will use wi-fi as the default connection and Ethernet will go away.

Security built into wi-fi appears to be adequate to the task, said Gartner, after the introduction of Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) into the equation.

And there’s more good news.  Gartner thinks by 2020 we’ll all be paying less than $100 for smartphone and other devices.  Subsidies or sponsorships will also reduce the cost of devices while by 2018 over half of business to enterprise (B2E) mobile apps will be used by business analysts using codeless tools.