Daily Network Monitor

Germany’s Siemens has set a speed record for electrical processing of data through a fiber-optic cable, it said Wednesday, opening the possibility of cheaper Internet and data networks.

Siemens said in a statement that it had processed data using exclusively electrical means at 107 gigabits per second–roughly two full DVDs per second–and sent it over a single optical fiber channel in a 100-mile U.S. network, the first time outside of a laboratory.

Online games, music and video downloads are generating increasing amounts of Internet traffic, creating a need for ever-faster and affordable transmission.

The test, two-and-a-half times faster than a previous maximum transmission performance per channel, was done in cooperation with Germany’s Micram Microelectronic, the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications and the Netherlands’ Eindhoven University of Technology.

Siemens said the advantage of its method of using electrical processing only was that it removed the need to split signals into multiple signals of lower data rates to avoid bottlenecks. Such bottlenecks make transmissions slower and more expensive.

“Such a system would be particularly interesting for the future 100-Gigabit Ethernet, on which the telecommunication providers are currently working,” Siemens said.

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The U.S. Postal Service has quietly terminated an 18-year, multibillion-dollar network services contract with Lockheed Martin that was to provide all of its data, voice, video and wireless services. Dubbed Universal Computing Connectivity (UCC), the contract was awarded to Lockheed Martin with much fanfare in October 2004. UCC had an estimated value of between $3 billion and $6 billion.

USPS terminated the UCC contract in July 2006.

Here’s all USPS will say about its change of heart:

“Due to changing business objectives/conditions, USPS and LM have agreed that the UCC contract cancellation is in their mutual best interests, and that it will not preclude the two parties from entering into other contracts in the future.”

Lockheed Martin has no comment on the UCC contract cancellation.

Lockheed Martin, a leading supplier of automated mail sorting equipment, was supposed to integrate networks that serve 38,000 postal locations nationwide. On its UCC team were leading network vendors, including BellSouth, Qwest, SBC Communications, Verizon, AT&T, HP and Hughes Network Systems.

At the time it awarded the UCC contract, the Postal Service was trying to migrate away from a network outsourcing contract held for many years by MCI. USPS leadership was troubled when MCI’s parent company WorldCom filed for bankruptcy in 2002.

Microsoft has released seven security patches for critical flaws in Internet Explorer, the Visual Studio 2005 development software and Windows Media Format.

The new patches, issued as part of its monthly security updates for December, tackle 11 bugs identified across several programs.

Four of the patches relate to a flaw in Internet Explorer that has been rated as critical and could begin to be exploited from as early as the end of this week.

Enterprise administrators, meanwhile, are expected to be interested in the release of a Simple Network Monitoring Protocol (SNMP) patch.

The patch has been deemed important rather than critical as SNMP is ordinarily blocked by firewalls and turned off by default on Windows systems.

However, it is widely used as part of the network-monitoring infrastructure in the enterprise, and is also frequently used on critical servers, Gunter Ollmann, director of IBM’s Internet Security System’s X-Force threat analysis service, said.

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