Level 3 Communications Blog
I work with our Product team at Level 3 to help translate “geek speak” into plain English. I've worked in telecom for over 20 years and have seen high-speed go from T1 to DWDM. When not at work I spend a lot of time chasing my three teenagers and refining my fly casting.
As our workforce at Level 3 continues to become more geographically diverse, one of the issues that I find myself sometimes faced with is how to provide “constructive criticism” across a span of a couple of thousand miles. There are email etiquette guidelines to help us remember that TYPING IN ALL CAPS IS NOT A [...]
By far, the most popular blog on Beyond Bandwidth is Fred Lawler’s post about the top ten reasons for fiber cuts. Besides being an interesting topic, the simple reason is that fiber cuts happen. It’s easy to understand why if you considering that the number one source of fiber cuts is squirrels. Those pesky little [...]
I have had enough of sales people telling me what’s best for me. Seriously, who knows what you or your business needs better than you? Do you really enjoy trying to buy something and having the sales person deliver the obligatory, “do you want fries with that” up-sell speech. Come on, how many of us [...]
Some of you may recall my post last year in which I explored the possibility of a career in real estate. Well, it’s a year later and I’m still working at Level 3. Seems that being able to explain the ins and outs of how to best configure MPLS to support enterprise class applications isn’t [...]
If you answered, “they are your employees and co-workers” you’re right. Today’s workers are more tech savvy and more productive than ever before. They are knowledge workers that get paid for what they have in their heads just as much if not more than for what they produce with their hands. They bring their own [...]
Once again there have been a large number of news articles released about another sophisticated cyber attack. On the surface this may seem to just be another attack in a long string of cyber-war battles; however this attack shows why virus-protection, firewalls, and software patches alone will never be enough to defeat the sophisticated tactics [...]
In my recent posts about cyber security, I have used analogies that relate Internet security to fighting fires and open warfare. However, I recently had a conversation with a CIO at Gartner IT Expo that put this topic in a different light for me. Many of the folks I speak with about the challenges of [...]
A few weeks ago, I told you that digging deeper moats wasn’t the way to protect yourself against today’s cyber attacks. In a nutshell, the issue is that no matter how deep the moat is, you will also need a drawbridge to cross it and the bad guys will attack the bridge instead of the [...]
I just got back from vacation and as I was looking back at our photos, I realized once again how the real world provides us with some pretty good examples of the basic principles we sometimes struggle with in the business world. My last adventure involved spending several days in the Canyonlands backcountry of Moab, [...]
At this year’s Gartner IT Expo, several Gartner analysts described the newest challenge of information management as “Bigger Data.” Big Data is yesterday’s problem. Now we’re dealing with Bigger Data. Bigger Data isn’t a problem driven by the amount of data. We already knew that data was going to grow. Bigger Data refers to the [...]
