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Cisco snuffs Spark, renames it 'WebEx Teams'

And Huawei's given carriers a 14G network (it does 2G to 5G and we did the sums)

Roundup Cisco leads the networking roundup this week, with news that there's one fewer way to avoid its WebEx brand: as part of a product reorganisation, what was Cisco Spark is to become WebEx Teams.

It's more than a rebrand, Cisco's Jonathan Rosenberg insisted here, because in the Olde Worlde, Sparkies could join Spark meetings, and Webex users could only join Webex meetings. Spark lost features if you managed to get it connected to WebEx.

The WebEx Teams app that replaces Spark can join a WebEx meeting without losing features, and there's a WebEx Teams team meeting feature replacing Spark meetings.

All meetings are now carried over the WebEx backbone, Rosenberg added.

Huawei's 5G network push

Huawei might be saying goodbye to America, but it's still bullish about 5G opportunities elsewhere.

Some of that “elsewhere” includes countries whose legacy kit reaches all the way back to the 2G era. That's a network operator nightmare, so Huawei's updated its SingleRAN suite.

SingleRAN gets a multi-standard baseband system to support 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G, with RF hardware resource sharing, and a multi-band, multi-channel RF and antenna unit.

Other highlights of operator-focussed announcements this week include a mobile cloud architecture that lets operators use the same software to support distributed base stations, centralised base stations, and a mix of both.

Cavium cooks secure silicon

Want to move keys around between different clouds? Cavum reckons it's got you covered its LiquidSecurity HSM (hardware security module) appliance. The 140-2 Level 3 FIPS-certified device offers key backup and application scaling with secured AWS CloudHSM (with the same security certifications) instances.

In its announcement, Cavum says “the cloud vendor can take backups of customer HSMs, [but] enterprises with escrow needs will benefit from the ability to securely transfer and retain access to their keys within a FIPS boundary.”

Cisco (again)

Cisco announced a deal with Agari to add capabilities to its e-mail protection products.

Its e-mail security kit gets domain protection by way of DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) support, and Agari also improves Cisco's anti-phishing protection.

Cisco's Advanced Malware Protection for Endpoints gets enhancements to protect against ransomware and cryptomining, and its endpoint console will get access to a cloud-based application, Cisco Visibility, built on Talos and third party systems to improve and simplify the investigation task.

Oh, by the way, if you own a Cisco Network Convergence System 1000 series product, we strongly urge you to check out this field notice, because some line cards might have the wrong label on them.

Or you could decide, since it's obviously in service and working, and you never even looked at the label, not to bother. ®

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