Archive for February 5, 2014

Industry Minister Announces New Cell Antenna Tower Rules

Posted in Commentary with tags , on February 5, 2014 by itnerd

You may recall that I posted a brief story about the fact that the Industry Minister James Moore was going to make an announcement today. Well, the announcement in question was that there will be new rules for wireless companies planning to install antenna towers:

To help address the concerns of citizens about the number of new towers being built in their communities, in March 2013 the Harper Government announced changes to its telecommunications policy. These changes reinforced the requirement that any company wanting to build a new tower first had to look at sharing an existing tower or using an existing structure for its antenna.

The improvements to the Antenna Tower Siting Policy that were announced today will further strengthen the requirements for the wireless industry to consult with local residents, increase transparency for municipalities and improve communications throughout the tower siting process.

Specific changes will include:

  • requiring a company to consult on all commercial tower installations, regardless of height;
  • establishing a three-year limit between the time of consultation and the time a tower is built;
  • ensuring residents are well-informed of upcoming consultations by requiring communications from the company to be clearly marked; and
  • encouraging municipalities to get involved early in the tower siting process.

Furthermore, new measures will strengthen federal communications with the public on tower siting procedures. This will include:

  • new online resources; and
  • new reporting mechanisms to track tower issues and report back to communities.

When an issue or impasse arises that is related to a new tower site, the parties can approach Industry Canada for a determination.

The location of cell antennas have been an issue in Canada with people often getting very upset at the location of some of these towers. Here are a few examples of this from across Canada. So this announcement addresses that concern. Now the cynical side of me also looks at this announcement and sees it as another shot across the bow of wireless companies because this process continues the trend of the Canadian Government wanting public input while taking a shot at the big three among others. But many will see this as a positive move.

Leave a comment »

TekSavvy Surveys Canadians…. Finds Internet Plans Are Confusing To Most

Posted in Commentary with tags on February 5, 2014 by itnerd

According to a survey done by Canadian independent ISP and telco TekSavvy, more than half of Canadians don’t have a clear understanding of their Internet plans. In addition, 67 per cent of respondents believe Internet plans in Canada are too expensive.Am I shocked by that? Not really. I said a while ago that it costs very little for a ISP to bring you Internet access. Plus I’m not surprised that Canadians find that Internet plan offerings from ISPs are confusing. I often get called by clients to help them to make sense of what an ISP offers.

Now TekSavvy has developed a new web application to simplify the process of selecting the right Internet plan based on individual households’ Internet usage patterns. By answering a few simple questions about how their household uses the Internet, consumers can easily determine which Internet plan best meets their needs. Now this is of course slanted towards getting you to sign up to get Internet access from Teksavvy. But I have to admit that when I tried it, it pretty much pegged my needs perfectly. So it could be useful as a means to pick your plan for any ISP so that you can get the most Internet for your hard earned dollars.

The key survey highlights are in an info graphic that I’ve posted below:

TekSavvy_Infographic-2

Leave a comment »

Citrix announces Immediate Availability of Palo Alto Networks VM-Series Firewall

Posted in Commentary with tags , on February 5, 2014 by itnerd

If you’re not familiar with the Palo Alto Networks-VM Series Firewall which was announced by both Palo Alto and their partner Citrix yesterday, that’s okay. Hang with me and I’ll explain why this matters to you if you’re job is to protect your corporate network from outside threats.

Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is a next-generation virtualized firewall and threat prevention offering, on the Citrix NetScaler SDX service delivery networking platform. This industry-first integration allows customers to use a single, multi-tenant platform to spin up dedicated advanced delivery controller (ADC) and next-generation firewall instances tailored to the specific needs of individual applications to safely enable applications, protect against known and unknown threats, and maximize application availability and performance.

That’s the techie nerdy description of what this is. Here’s the English version.

Virtualized and cloud environments have to be secure. But at the same time they also have to be efficient at delivering the right applications to the right users using any device and from any location. This isn’t easy to do. But with the VM-Series, a company can embrace the key characteristics of cloud and virtualized computing:

  • Multi-tenancy – the ability to support differing needs of new application owners, business units or service provider customers
  • Agility – the services must have the ability to be provisioned and de-provisioned on demand, with support for automation and orchestration
  • Scalability – the services must have the ability to flexibly scale up, scale out capacity to meet the needs of the business

Now Palo Alto has brought Citrix into the picture and they’ve brought their NetScaler SDX service delivery networking platform for enterprise and cloud datacenters. This allows companies to bring services to employees anywhere. The combination of the two allows organizations to achieve substantial infrastructure consolidation and reduce costs and complexity without compromising on functionality. The reason being is that they only have to manage a single box to deliver virtualized and cloud environments to end users securely.

I’ve embedded a video below that gives a brief overview of this. Enjoy!

 

Leave a comment »