Week in review: The proof is in the network

We’ve been hearing for months that network spending has immunity from other IT budget cutbacks this year - we’ve just been waiting to see the proof.

This week, it magically seemed to appear as state government and private sector organisations alike kicked off network upgrades, ISPs bought rights to resell capacity from other people’s networks, and even researchers got in on the act.

In fact, probably the only firm that wasn’t able to come to the party was Nortel. It filed for bankruptcy protection in several geographies, notably the U.S. and EMEA, though Australia and indeed APAC appears to be unaffected. We’re due to speak to them early next week so we’ll keep you posted.

Others got lucky. 3com managed to negotiate a direct supply deal with the Queensland Department of Education that will benefit secondary students that get laptops under the Rudd Government’s digital education revolution initiative.

Likewise, Juniper landed a purchase order at Australian Unity, Riverbed put its WAN optimisation to work at the NSW Department of Environment and Climate Change, and Sophos reclaimed the right to protect the ACT government’s desktops, laptops, file servers and other networked assets with endpoint security.

It was also a week when Aussie researchers did cool things with network technologies - and the CSIRO was involved in both. The first project involved networking fridges together so they can ‘negotiate’ when to consume power, and the second networked radio telescopes from across the world to demonstrate a cosmic imaging technique in Paris.

But some networks just couldn’t stay out of trouble. Optus Networks copped a $110,000 fine from the Australian Communications and Media Authority over spam allegations and Telstra’s lawyers decided to appeal an overruling by the Australian Competition Tribunal late last year that would have relaxed some wholesale voice regulations for the carrier.

Broadband networks also got a workout, with ispOne inking a deal to resell Telstra ADSL2+ services in addition to its existing offerings from Optus Wholesale, Internode upgrading its inter-capital city bandwidth links, and community WiFi operator myKP making a dramatic entrance into the xDSL game.