VIEWPOINT

Asia and the Pacific is the most digitally divided region of the world, and South-East Asia is the most divided subregion. The Covid-19 pandemic detonated a “digital big bang” that spurred people, governments and businesses to become “digital by default;” a sea change that generated vast digital dividends.

These benefits that have not been distributed equally, however. New development gaps have emerged as digital transformation reinforces a vicious cycle of socioeconomic inequalities, within and across countries.

Bridging these divides and ensuring advances in technology can benefit everyone will be a key challenge as the region seeks to achieve a more inclusive and sustainable post-pandemic recovery. A new ESCAP report, Asia-Pacific Digital Transformation Report 2022: Shaping our digital future, identifies five key “digital divides;” fault lines that separate those who can readily take advantage of new technology from those more likely to be left behind. These divides are related to age, gender, education, disability and geography.

Typically, those most comfortable with technological innovation are younger and better educated people who have grown up with the Internet as ”digital natives”. Older persons may be more distrustful, or slower to acquire the necessary skills or suffer declines in aptitude. But at any age, poor communities – especially those in rural areas – are most at risk as they may be unable to afford electricity or digital connections or lack the relevant skills, even if the necessary infrastructure and connectivity are there.

The most significant driver of digital transformation is business research and its development and adoption of frontier technologies. Another major component is e-government; the delivery of public information and services via the Internet or through other digital means. This has the potential for more efficient and inclusive operations; especially when linked to national digital ID systems. However, because e-government services often evolve in complex regulatory environments, providing appropriate levels of accessibility for older generations, the disabled, or those with limited education has become more challenging.

It is clear that digital technologies are enabling the delivery of previously unimagined services while enhancing productivity and optimizing resource use that helped reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and pollutants. These technologies also helped track and contain pandemic spread. Social networks are fostering and diversifying communications among people of all ages sharing common interests, irrespective of location. This helps them stay in touch, broaden their experiences, continue education or deepen subject knowledge. This provided a veritable lifeline that has continued as we enter the post-pandemic era.

At the same time, the risks have also proliferated. Social networks also created social ”echo chambers” and generated torrents of misinformation and hate speech. New cryptocurrencies have opened the way to speculative financial bubbles, while cybercrime increased alarmingly as it assumed prolific variations. In addition, digital gadgets and the Internet are thought to contribute to more than 2 per cent of the global carbon footprint. The manufacture of electronic hardware can also exhaust supplies of natural resources such as rare-earth elements and precious metals like cobalt and lithium.

Moreover, digital transformation has led to the creation of an immense amount of digital data which become an essential resource to understand digital transformation. However, it raises concerns about the ethical and responsible use of data for privacy protection. A common understanding among countries on the operationalization of such principles has yet to evolve.

This viewpoint is from by Ms. Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana, UN Under-Secretary-General and Executive Secretary of the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP),

The post Shaping our digital future – a focus on Asia and the Pacific first appeared on Total Telecom.

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NEWS

Reports suggest that Altice International was the subject of a cyberattack earlier this month, but the scale of the attack has yet to be announced

Today, a report from RedPacket Security suggests that France’s second largest operator, Altice, has been hit by a ransomware attack from the cybercriminal gang Hive.

RedPacket Security is an InfoSec news site that scrapes information relating to cyberattacks from the dark web, with the site reporting that the attack took place on August 9 this year, though it was only disclosed by the hacker group yesterday.

The scale of the attack is unclear, but files are reportedly available for download via the Tor browser.

The attack has not been publicly disclosed by Altice

Having been first detected in the summer of 2021, the Hive ransomware group has quickly become one of the most prolific ransomware gangs in the world, instigating over 350 attacks on various targets, primarily in the healthcare and financial services sectors.

To make matters worse, earlier this year, Hive was reported as having overhauled its software, migrating the code to the Rust programming language and therefore enabling even more complex encryption.

Most recently, the group successfully attacked two sixth-form colleges in Bedfordshire, UK, demanding £500,000 for the release of the stolen data.

Like so many ransomware gangs in 2022, Hive typically operates via a strategy known as ‘double extortion’.

In the past, ransomware typically worked by hacker groups gaining access to sensitive files, encrypting them, and threatening the owner with deletion of the files if they did not pay a ransom for the encryption key. However, companies quickly grew wise to this threat, creating and storing various copies of their data elsewhere to negate the risk of encryption and deletion.

In turn, this has led ransomware companies to evolve, with many now not only encrypting the compromised files but exporting them and threatening to leak or sell the sensitive data if their demands are not met. This is what is known as ‘double extortion’.

With their vast stores of customer data, telcos themselves are becoming increasingly appetising targets for ransomware gangs, with reports of attacks increasing dramatically since the start of the pandemic, which forced millions of people to work from home and therefore potentially created new vulnerabilities.

The most notable of these attacks took place against T-Mobile around a year ago, with an attack compromising data for millions of existing, past, and even prospective T-Mobile customers.

According to a recent report from Acronis, ransomware has rapidly become the number one threat to medium and large-sized organisations in 2022.

 

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The post Altice stung by ransomware group Hive first appeared on Total Telecom.

Press Release

stc announced the landing of “Saudi Vision Cable”,  the first high-speed cable in the Red Sea through its first landing station in Jeddah

With the name inspired by the KSA Vision 2030, the Saudi Vision Cable spans 1,160,000 meters and it is fully owned by stc Group. The Saudi Vision cable is the first ever high-capacity submarine cable in the Red Sea region that will provide seamless connectivity up to 18Tbps/fiber pair with a total of 16 fiber pairs through four (04) landings in Jeddah, Yanbu, Duba, and Haql. 

Marking this event, Eng. Olayan Bin Mohammed Alwetaid Group, CEO of stc, said: “This achievement reflects our comprehensive strategy that aims to diversify the Group’s investment opportunities and support digital transformation in the KSA by boosting the digital infrastructure. The cable will provide digital connectivity services for corporates and individuals between the KSA and the continents by building a regional digital hub connecting the continents of the globe and help meet the needs of companies and customers via an integrated digital ecosystem”.  

“Saudi Vision Cable provides communication between several international information centers. It also achieves the raising level of the unified optical fiber platform that is cost-efficient and flexible, and provides access – low latency – to all international cables in the landing stations and information centers of the stc Group”, he added.  

The new cable will be one of the submarine cables that will be linked to the MENA Hub connecting three continents of the globe, leveraging the strategic location of KSA. This will help to enhance investment in international communication services and data centers.  

This cable will join 16 cables invested by stc that are positioned between the east and the west of the KSA. Saudi Vision cable will provide a higher and more reliable internet service to meet the increasing demand for communications and internet at the local and international levels. It will also allow all of the country’s sectors to obtain high-speed internet services, including education, healthcare and business which will, in general, provide economic and social benefits. 

 

How will the Saudi Vision Cable affect the connectivity landscape throughout the Mediterranean and the Middle East? Join the submarine cable community in discussion at Submarine Networks EMEA 2023

Also in the news:
UK drone ‘superhighway’ cleared for take-off
FCC wants additional $3bn to ‘rip and replace’ Chinese network kit
Telefonica and Ericsson demo 5G network slicing for diverse use case

The post STC launch the Red Sea’s first subsea cable first appeared on Total Telecom.

NEWS

The ‘Coverage Above and Beyond’ plan will see the next generation of Starlink satellites provide mobile services directly to T-Mobile customers’ smartphones

This week, a highly anticipated deal between Elon Musk’s SpaceX and T-Mobile has been announced, with the new partnership aiming to use the former’s low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellation, Starlink, to plug movile coverage gaps across the USA.

The ‘Coverage Above and Beyond’ initiative will see customers gain access to Starlink internet services directly to their device for the first time, theoretically allowing them mobile coverage anywhere in the country.

Currently, SpaceX’s almost 3,000 orbiting satellites provide connectivity via ground terminals, which customers can purchase and deploy themselves. These ground stations act as an intermediary between the satellites in orbit roughly 550km above the Earth’s surface and the users’ smartphones or other devices.

However, next year SpaceX will begin launching a second-generation of satellites, equipped with new phased array antennas capable of delivering direct-to-device connectivity.

According to the partners, SpaceX’s services will be directly available on the vast majority of smartphones already on T-Mobile’s network, without the need for new handsets.

“We are constructing special antenna. […] They are actually very big antenna that are extremely advanced,” said Musk. “The important thing is you will not need to get a new phone. The phone you currently have will work.”

The Starlink satellites will use T-Mobile’s mid-band spectrum to deliver high-speed connectivity.

According to T-Mobile, there are currently around 500,000 square kilometres of the US that remains unreached by terrestrial mobile connectivity, all of which could be covered as part of the new deal.

“It is about solving the biggest pain point in the over-40-year history of our industry,” said T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert. “This partnership has a vision that is the end of mobile dead zones”.

While initially penned to cover the US, in future the partners plan to expand this connectivity initiative worldwide, with T-Mobile offering reciprocal roaming to providers that take part in the scheme.

“The important thing about this is that there will be no dead zones for your phone anywhere in the world,” said Musk, who noted that truly ubiquitous global coverage would save lives, allowing people to call for help if needed no matter where they are in the world – provided they are outside, of course.

A beta service from the satellites will be available before the end of 2023 in selected areas, with services initially set to be limited to texting and messaging. Voice and data capabilities will be added at a later date.

While SpaceX’s Starlink is currently the largest LEO constellation in the world – and will presumably remain so, if Musk’s plans to ultimately launch up to 42,000 satellites come to pass – it should be remembered that it is not the only satellite company in the US planning direct-to-device connectivity. In fact, AT&T has been working with AST SpaceMobile since at least 2019, with the duo announcing earlier this year that they will soon test transmissions from regular smartphones to SpaceMobile’s new satellite using AT&T spectrum.

AST SpaceMobile already has a similar Memorandum of Understanding with Telefonica.

Starlink will also have to contend with OneWeb’s growing LEO constellation and ultimately the large-scale launch of Amazon’s Project Kuiper, though dates for the latter’s initial launches have yet to be confirmed.

But despite growing competition, this deal represents a major win for SpaceX at a time when its Starlink constellation needs it most. SpaceX was recently denied $885.5 million in government subsidies to rollout broadband in rural areas, with the Federal Communications Commission saying the company had failed to demonstrate that they could achieve the speeds they promised to deliver in their application.

 

The post T-Mobile taps SpaceX to plug coverage gaps with satellite connectivity first appeared on Total Telecom.