WCA November 2020

From the Americas factory’s vice president of 787 operations, a senior quality manager and the director of jet deliveries, and that Boeing had implemented an organisational structure that did not conform to ODA procedures, with managers in unapproved roles. Boeing said in both instances “allegations were appropriately reported, investigated, and disclosed to the FAA” and added it took “corrective action in response”. Boeing was granted 30 days within which to pay the fine, or to provide more information. A 2016 Boeing survey released by a congressional panel found nearly 40 per cent of 523 employees handling safe - ty-certification work perceived “potential undue pressure” from managers, and evidence of “undue pressure” was highlighted by international regulators reviewing the 737 Max certification. White House programmes Partnership to boost quantum science education The Trump administration’s Office of Science and Technology Policy has revealed a national education partnership with major companies and research institutions, to expand access to K-12 Quantum Information Science (QIS) education. The public-private initiative with the National Science Foundation will include Amazon Web Services, Boeing Co, Google, IBM Corporation, Lockheed Martin Corporation, Microsoft, and the universities of Illinois and Chicago. The National Science Foundation is also awarding $1mn to QIS education. The initiative will help introduce quantum information themes to students before they start college. Earlier this year the White House announced $75mn of funding for new institutes at three US universities to boost quantum information research. Quantum computing has the potential to operate millions of times faster than current supercomputers. Experts are predicting that the emerging technology will have a major impact on applications such as healthcare, communications, financial services, transportation, artificial intelligence and weather forecasting. Clean Network programme for clouds, cables and apps The Trump administration is expanding its Clean Network programme to remove Chinese networking technology from infrastructure in the USA and its allies. Originally focused on 5G equipment, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the programme will “secure” carriers, apps, cloud systems and submarine cables. In a statement, Mr Pompeo said, “The Clean Network programme is the Trump administration’s comprehensive approach to guarding our citizens’ privacy and our companies’ most sensitive information from aggressive intrusions by malign actors.”

The initiative began in April as the Clean Path initiative, with the aim of securing data travelling into US diplomatic facilities overseas and within the USA on 5G networks. More than thirty countries and territories “are now Clean Countries,” Mr Pompeo said, with many of the world’s biggest telecommunications companies being described as Clean Telcos because they have committed to using only trusted vendors in their Clean Networks. Orange in France, Reliance Jio in India, Telstra in Australia, SK and KT in South Korea, NTT in Japan and O2 in the UK are among the firms counted as “clean”. It is unclear if sanctions will be levied against companies that do not pledge to be clean, but they may be excluded from bidding for US government contracts. Short news à à Flexential has a new network tenant and new expansion projects in Hillsboro, Oregon. Telstra has expanded its network into the company’s Portland-Hillsboro 2 data centre, which houses endpoints of both the New Cross Pacific and Hawaiki cable systems. Flexential continues to expand its data centre facilities, and in September was due to break ground on a third facility, Hillsboro 3, adding a further 36MW of space. à à Cloudflare has partnered with PacketFabric to further its reach to potential customers, announcing the release of the Cloudflare Network Interconnect via PacketFabric’s Network-as-a-Service platform. The two will interconnect in 15 markets across North America and the Asia-Pacific region, giving Cloudflare customers the opportunity to take advantage of private connections from a wide range of markets and facilities. à à Avelacom has expanded its low latency network into the financial markets of Brazil, having launched services for traders on B3 with a new PoP in the Brazilian stock exchange’s data centre. Avelacom’s network connects to other global markets through a connection to the New York metropolitan area. à à Edge Cable Holdings, working on the Jupiter cable off the coast of Oregon, angered environmental groups when it eventually revealed the company had lost drilling equipment into the sea. Lost assets included 1,100 feet of drill pipe, a drill tip, tools and 6,500 gallons of drilling fluid. The incident occurred in April but went unreported for some months. à à Windstream Enterprise is offering a new VNF next- generation firewall capability alongside its managed SD-WAN service. The VNF runs on the same hardware as Windstream’s current VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud solution. Windstream has been actively building out a multi-pronged secure networking portfolio for the enterprise market.

Gill Watson Features Editor

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Wire & Cable ASIA – November/December 2020

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