Stories by Tim Greene

  • Case study: schools break through the firewall

    Five years ago, the Imperial County Office of Education in California had a vision to put videoconferencing into every classroom in its 56 schools, but it wasn’t until last year that it solved a key problem: getting the video traffic to go through firewalls easily.

  • Nokia adds cluster features to VPN gear

    Nokia last week announced software for its VPN appliances that will let users strap together the devices to improve performance and protect against critical VPN sites crashing.

  • Quarry mines VPN, firewall treasures

    Quarry Technologies is introducing firewall and VPN capabilities for its service edge switches that enable carriers to protect traffic between customer sites rather than just within carriers' networks.

  • Check Point strengthens SOHO security offering

    Forging ahead with new gear for small and home offices, Check Point Software Technologies announced on Tuesday two new firewall/VPN (Virtual Private Network) appliances and updated small-office software.

  • IETF halts VPN protocol work

    The protocol widely used to set up VPN tunnels is potentially insecure and work on extending its use should be halted, according to The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

  • Radguard goes quietly

    Despite an attempted comeback after firing everyone in March, the founders of VPN (virtual private network) vendor Radguard say they will liquidate the seven-year-old company, according to reports.

  • Enterasys goes for a swim in Indus river

    Cabletron Systems spinoff Enterasys is absorbing VPN startup Indus River Networks in a deal worth $US170 million, giving Enterasys highly manageable Indus River VPN equipment to augment its "adaptive infrastructure" architecture.

  • Network vendors continue acquisition trend

    There have been a slew of network companies announcing acquisitions, continuing a trend which shows no sign of stopping soon. Interestingly, the companies doing the buying were a mix of large and small firms. These included Lucent and Nortel, as well as Akamai and Kana Communications, which have huge market capitalisations thanks to Wall Street's current infatuation with Internet stocks.

  • Lucent turns to mirrors for optical switching

    Lucent has taken the electricity out of switched optical networks. The company next year plans to ship the WaveStar LambdaRouter, an all-optical device that switches light from one fibre to another without first converting the light to an electrical signal and then back to an optical one.

  • Optical visionary sees OC-48s in your future

    Start thinking about buying WAN bandwidth by the gigabit. That's the advice of Desh Deshpande, CEO of US-based Sycamore Networks, which is building optical gear for carriers. Following his success as founder of frame relay pioneer Cascade Communications, Deshpande has turned his eyes to the next frontier: optical networking. He says new optical hardware will make bandwidth so plentiful and so easy to set up and manage that enterprise network executives will stop thinking about the WAN as a place in which bandwidth must be conserved. Deshpande recently talked with IDG's Tim Greene about the future of optical networking.

  • 56Kbps modems now a safe bet

    User fears about the interoperability of 56Kbps modem compatibility should be put to rest by the end of the month. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is scheduled to give final approval to the V.90 standard for the fast modems during its meeting in Geneva this month.