What’s up with… Lumen & Ciena, Sky, ITU

• Lumen and Ciena claim optical world first
• Sky is cutting 2,000 jobs in the UK
• ITU warns of satellite jamming

In today’s industry news roundup: US operator Lumen Technologies has made a data transport breakthrough with Ciena; UK broadband service provider is cutting 7% of its workforce; the ITU and other agencies are concerned about satellite communications interference; and much more!

US network operator Lumen Technologies says it has successfully set up a 1.2 Tbit/s wavelength service connection across a 1,800 mile link of its fibre network between Denver and Dallas using technology from optical equipment vendor Ciena, with the operator claiming it is “the world’s longest 1.2 Tbit/s non-regenerated signal”. Using 800 Gbit/s interfaces, the operator and vendor “successfully tested and qualified the services to support wavelength, Ethernet and IP services over the 1.2 Tbit/s single carrier channel”. Dave Ward, Lumen’s chief technology and product officer, stated that “1.2 Tbit/s isn’t just about incredible speed and long distances, it’s about the value of enabling the next wave of digital transformation. Lumen is at the forefront of building a next-generation network designed to handle the explosive growth of AI and cloud workloads. Our investment in increased capacity, powered by Ciena's WaveLogic 6 technology, provides our hyperscale cloud partners and enterprises with the ultra-high-capacity connectivity needed to scale their AI and cloud applications. With 400G connectivity speeds today and a seamless upgrade path to 1.2 Tbit/s, Lumen stands as the trusted network for AI,” added Ward. Lumen has already been in the news in the past few days as speculation spread that it was lining up a deal to sell its consumer broadband business to AT&T. Speaking of AT&T, it recently boasted of its own significant long-distance network milestone, with Ciena involved in that breakthrough too.  

Comcast-owned UK media and broadband giant Sky is cutting 2,000 call centre jobs, equivalent to about 7% of its workforce, as it revamps and automates its customer services operations, in part using AI chatbots. It is to close three of its 10 customer service centres and says it will invest in “cutting-edge digital technology to make our service seamless, reliable, and available 24/7”.

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has joined forces with the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) and the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) to issue a joint statement saying that the three UN agencies view with “grave concern” the increasing rate of incidents of deliberate and concentrated jamming and spoofing of aviation, maritime and other satellite communications services and navigation systems by nation states, their military organisations and various “bad actors”. The potential that such interference will cause planes to crash and ships to sink is so great that the statement urges immediate action to enhance the protection of global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) that operate in the critical radio-frequency bands allocated to the radio navigation satellite service (RNSS). GNSS orbital systems provide positioning, navigation and timing services worldwide. They are vital for the safety of civilian aircraft, maritime vessels, humanitarian assistance vehicles and, equally importantly, for the time synchronisation of telecom networks. The ITU secretary-general, Doreen Bogdan-Martin, commented: “Member states [of the ITU, ICAO and IMO] should ensure the uninterrupted operation of these systems for everyone’s safety and the resilience of essential services that our lives depend on.” To that end, they are tasked with “protecting the RNSS from transmissions that can adversely cause harmful interference degrading, interrupting or misleading signals used for civilian and humanitarian purposes” whilst “reinforcing resilience of the systems which rely on RNSS for navigation, positioning and timing in relation to this type of interference.” The 193 member states of the ITU are additionally urged to “retain sufficient conventional navigation infrastructure for contingency support in case of RNSS outages and misleading signals and to develop mitigation techniques for loss of services.” The communique also requires increased collaboration between radio regulatory, civil aviation, maritime, defence and enforcement authorities and calls on them to report all cases of harmful interference affecting RNSS to the appropriate telecom, aeronautical and maritime authorities, and to the ITU Radiocommunications Bureau, to enable the monitoring of the situation. That’ll keep them busy as the jamming and spoofing is proliferating at an alarming rate. Mario Maniewicz, director of the ITU Radiocommunication Bureau, added: “Protecting radio communications systems from harmful interference is at the core of ITU’s mandate. We call on our members to make responsible use of the radiofrequency spectrum, which is a precious, natural and shared resource we rely on for communicating, travelling and working in our daily lives.” However, as the old adage has it, “Fine words butter no parsnips”. Calls for moderation in a time of increasing geopolitical tensions will fall on deaf ears in some member states. The joint statement does not name them, but we all know who they are… 

As geopolitical and economic antagonisms convulse much of the planet, Leaseweb, a cloud computing and web services company headquartered in Amsterdam, has made a timely and apposite intervention in a press statement that focuses on the notion of “cloud sovereignty” and how nations and regions are reconsidering digital independence and joining the emerging movement away from reliance on the US in general and US hyperscalers in particular. The release reflects the growing influence of data sovereignty that, in turn, is inspiring the drafting and passing of legislation in many parts of the world (including Canada and the US). The release, which focuses mainly on Europe, says the trend towards data sovereignty is “a real-world example of how geopolitics is reshaping cloud infrastructure in a multi-polar technology world.” The story takes as an example the ways in which European entities are actively reducing their reliance on US cloud giants such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and others. It’s a major shift and a potentially massive problem with global implications for US tech companies as their hegemony is challenged head-on for the first time. Leaseweb is hardly a disinterested party – in the release it emphasises its contribution to the EU’s Important Projects of Common European Interest on Cloud Infrastructure and Services (IPCEI-CIS) and stresses that via its European Cloud Campus project, Leaseweb is actively building the foundation for a sovereign European cloud designed to protect sensitive data, comply with EU regulations, and “ensure that Europe’s digital infrastructure is no longer dependent on US providers.” Over the past nine months, Leaseweb has made major contributions to the IPCEI-CIS initiative, including the development of powerful and flexible cloud infrastructure. This includes such things as creating a scalable compute platform with enhanced automation capabilities, including an open API to streamline automation initially for virtual machines and with plans to integrate physical servers and storage by 2026. It has also developed data integration tools for interaction with public cloud compute services and has created a flexible, multi-tenant system for running applications, enabling independent operations within shared clusters. This, the company claims, is the foundation for new sovereign cloud services in Europe. Leaseweb is one of what is expected to be a growing number of companies promoting European data sovereignty as the Trump administration continues, unilaterally, to overturn established political and economic ties that have existed, in some cases, for well over a century. 

A cryptographer’s dream come true? In the US, a team of researchers from JPMorganChase, Quantinuum, Argonne National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Texas at Austin have used a quantum computer to demonstrate the generation of ‘genuinely random’ random numbers and then used a classical computer to prove that were indeed truly random and freshly generated. A new paper, ‘Certified randomness using a trapped-ion quantum processor’, published in the highly respected academic journal Nature, makes clear that it is very difficult to program a traditional computer to generate random numbers because such machines usually produce only predictable inputs based on what they are programmed to do. Without randomness, all crypto operations would be predictable and thus inherently insecure. Genuine random numbers are vital to a wide range of digital encryption requirements, including passwords, browsers and huge masses of online and digital data. The development is expected to lead to the use of quantum computers for real-word tasks that would not be possible by ‘classical’ computers. The certified randomness protocol used in the demonstration was invented by Scott Aaronson, the Schlumberger centennial chair of computer science and director of the Quantum Information Center at The University of Texas at Austin. The development of quantum computers is gathering pace all over the world and, last year, scientists from JPMorganChase, Google and Quantinuum, a quantum computing company based in Colorado, showed that they had successfully completed tasks on their respective quantum computers that would have been impossible for even the biggest traditional supercomputer to solve. This demonstrated what is called “quantum supremacy”. However, that supremacy remained theoretical until the research team refined the process of random circuit sampling (RCS) to generate certified randomness. Thus, even if an ‘adversary’ has a working quantum computer, it would be impossible to manipulate the output and retain certified randomness. The feat was achieved using a 56-qubit Quantinuum System Model H2 trapped-ion quantum computer remotely over the internet, with the researchers generating certifiably random bits via a certified-randomness-expansion protocol based on RCS, which outputs more randomness than it takes as input. Announcing the results of the team’s experiments, Marco Pistoia, head of global technology applied research and distinguished engineer at JPMorganChase, said, “This work marks a major milestone in quantum computing, demonstrating a solution to a real-world challenge using a quantum computer beyond the capabilities of classical supercomputers today. This development of certified randomness not only shows advancements in quantum hardware but will be vital to further research, statistical sampling, numerical simulations and cryptography.”

– The staff, TelecomTV