If you’re like us, you’ve saved the best stuff on the Internet for some lazy weekend reading. Our team has four suggestions for telecoms pieces that'll make your morning coffee and your reading queue a little more interesting.
The Bandwidth Bottleneck That is Throttling the Internet
Why it’s worth your time: The cables that travel between data centers carry a limited amount of information at any given second; this is what we call bandwidth. And as demand for information skyrockets, bandwidth has to keep up, or it’s buffer symbols for everybody.
While the Internet can seem like a magic, the truth is that it takes a lot of physical pieces to bring it to life. This piece from Nature does a great job at underscoring that.
Cloud Computing Brings Sprawling Centers, but Few Jobs, to Small Towns
Why it’s worth your time: Here we examine Amazon’s, Google’s, and Microsoft’s race to grow their networks in the context of the small towns across the U.S. that have become home to new data centers.
As author Quentin Hardy puts it, “Local people, along with many economists and officials, often think these data centers are a key to an industrial revival. But the reality is less impressive.”
How a Computer Outage Can Take Down a Whole Airline
Why it’s worth your time: In July, the failure of a single data center router forced Southwest to cancel 2,300 flights. That ultimately cost the airline well over $10 million.
This is a fascinating read for anyone who has ever flown on an airplane. The complexity of the systems that keep our airlines on track is remarkable.
4G Breaks Through That Great Chinese Wall
Why it’s worth your time: Would you believe that China is home to twice as many 4G users as the next largest market? Twice as many. That’s a lot.
To understand why, we need to dig into the history of China’s main mobile operators and regulations that led all three to adopt the TD-LTE standard.
