The Media Rights Agenda (MRA) has condemned the harassment of the leader of a citizens group by the Department of State Services (DSS) for exercising their fundamental right to request information from the government under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act, 2011, describing the act of intimidation as unlawful and aimed at undermining the very principles of transparency and accountability that the Act is designed to uphold.
The DSS in Ibeju-Lekki in Lagos State is reported to have called one of the conveners of Ibeju-Lekki Peoples Forum, Mr. Jamiu Olayinka, on telephone in the morning of September 12, 2024 and asked him to report at the DSS office in Ibeju-Lekki at 10am that same day.
The stakeholders in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) have restated the value of the Fifth Generation (5G) services, especially on the positive use of the internet to ease connectivity, reports ITREALMS.
They also noted that 5G technology has enhanced capabilities that will provide superior communications services for the socio-economic development of Nigeria and facilitate attainment of a national digital economy.
The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has put up another two slots of 3.5GHz spectrum band for auction before end of 2022, to boost deployment of Fifth Generation (5G) services in Nigeria, reports ITREALMS.
According to the Director, Public Affairs at NCC, Mr. Rueben Muoka in a press statement available to ITREALMS, said Tuesday that the process, which was made public on 21st October 2022 with the publication of the Draft Information Memorandum (IM) for the auction on the Commission’s website, invited stakeholders to study the Memorandum for purposes of making submissions ahead of a review of the IM on 16th November 2022.
This ETSI said entails the creation of a new Industry Specification Group addressing Non-IP Networking (ISG NIN). ITREALMS gathered that the kick-off-meeting for ISG-NIN took place on 25 March and John Grant, BSI, was elected as the ISG Chair, and Kevin Smith, Vodafone, was elected as ISG Vice Chair.
“With the increasing challenges placed on modern networks to support new use cases and greater connectivity, Service Providers are looking for candidate technologies that may serve their needs better than the Transmission Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)-based networking used in current systems.ITREALMS equally gathered that ISG-NIN, according to Claire Boyer, intends to develop standards that define technologies to make more efficient use of capacity, have security by design, and provide lower latency for live media.
In 2015, ITREALMS recalled, several mobile operators identified problems with the TCP/IP-based technology used in the Fourth Generation (4G) networks, which included the complex and inefficient use of spectrum resulting from adding mobility, security, quality-of-service, and other features to a protocol that was never designed for them.
In addition,ITREALMS gathered, the subsequent fixes and workarounds designed to overcome these problems themselves incur increased cost, latency, and greater power-consumption. TCP/IP was therefore deemed as non-optimal for the more advanced 5G services.
Further, ETSI noted that its Industry Specification Group on Next Generation Protocols (ISG NGP), created in 2015, had the mission to analyse these problems and suggest alternative solutions. ISG NGP identified candidate technologies that would address the issues directly, dramatically reducing header sizes, per-packet processing, and latency experienced by live media, while remaining compatible with the current Internet and with newer technologies such as SDN and MPLS. ISG NGP also published a set of Key Performance Indicators that allow an objective assessment of the ability of networking protocols to meet operators’ needs.
“Today, we see the evolution of ISG NGP in a new group dedicated to the specification of alternative technologies to better serve the new 5G applications, as well as being more efficient and easier to manage, with lower CapEx and OpEx, when used for current applications.
“It is expected that the work of ISG NIN will be applicable initially to private mobile networks such as factory automation, and then expanded to public systems, both in the Core network and eventually end to end including the Radio elements.
“The group’s first output will be a Report detailing the shortcomings of TCP/IP, and how the new alternative system would overcome those shortcomings. ISG NIN will also work on specifying how the technologies initially identified by ISG NGP will form the basis of the new protocols, as well as creating a framework for testing the efficiency and effectiveness of the new protocols, including over radio,” a press statement from ETSI available to ITREALMS read.
“I’m really happy to have been entrusted with the Chairmanship of this group. Finding new protocols for internet more suitable to the 5G era was essential. Big data and mission-critical systems such as industrial control, intelligent vehicles. and remote medicine cannot be addressed the best way with current TCP/IP-based networking” says John Grant, Chair of ISG NIN.
“The IP stack and OSI layer model have undeniably enabled global connectivity – but since they originated in the 1970s, their design reflects the demands and capabilities of that era. Reassessing the fundamental design principles of network protocols offers the opportunity to deliver performance, security and efficiency gains for 2020 access networks and use cases, and may be achieved with simplification rather than expensive add-ons. The work of ETSI ISG NIN, in co-operation with industry organizations, can provide operators with a cutting-edge protocol suite to add to their service portfolio” says Kevin Smith, Vice Chair of ISG NIN.
Chuks Egbune/DoP
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