Page 195 – Mobile Europe

Dell’Oro Telecom Capex report doesn’t see the VAR side of the gloom

Nick Booth

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5 April 2023

Dell’Oro Telecom Capex report doesn’t see the VAR side of the gloom

Vendor’s indecision is final

Sales of networking equipment to telcos will fall this year according to the Telecom Capex March 2023 release from researcher The Dell’Oro Group. The high-single digit growth in 2021 has translated into a slump in sales of Backhaul, Optical Transport, Mobile Core and Radio Access Network (pictured) equipment. The bottom line is that fewer purchases of routers and switches are being rubber stamped at Bought Ledger by the Bob Cratchett’s of mobile telecoms firms. That is only half the story, say many telecom suppliers.

Though spending on telecoms equipment, by volume, went into decline in 2023, the time what purchasers make suppliers jump through hoops has lengthened, according to UK’s value added resellers (VARs) consulted by Mobile Europe. This means the telecom supply chain, a supposedly crucial but delicate ecosystem of start-ups, is being snuffed out by the suffocating indecision of purchasers at UK telcos.

Some in the telecom supply chain say the Dell’Oro report does not capture the agony of offering creative solutions to the problems of Mobile Operators. Feedback given to Mobile Europe suggests that although they pay lip service to speed, agility and innovation, many purchasing managers are the complete opposite of their job description. This is the hidden scandal of telecoms purchasing. The procurement at big telcos takes forever to make up their minds, they treat inventors like dirt and only feel safe buying from companies that are reassuringly expensive.

The Telecom Capex report says the slow aggregate telco equipment trends are a consequence partly of factors like currency variations and the improved capex outlook in China. The report took its data from the world’s top-50 carriers who collectively generated combined annual revenue and investments of some $1.7tn over the past 12 months. These carriers account for about 80% of worldwide telecoms capex and revenue.

However, one supplier called for a more granular detail is needed for a report on local conditions, particularly in the Middle East and Africa. Each regional has its own supply chain ecosystem which is supposed to be fostering the creative start ups that will revitalise the mobile telecoms sector. One service provider, which created a system that would instantly slash a telco’s power usage, described how their contact at the telco seemed to use their position to make them jump through hoops, by organising meeting after meeting.

It’s not the size of the CAPEX that matters, it’s the qualities of the person who is expending it, according to one frustrated suppler, it’s better to have one small project in hand, than a huge mythical beast that’s never going to happen in real life. The bottom line is that the lack of empathy for creatives in the supply chain is killing the very ’innovation’ that many telco executives pretend to be passionate about.

Telcos are target for Killnet and malcontents for DDoS attacks

Nick Booth

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5 April 2023

0

Telcos are target for Killnet and malcontents for DDoS attacks

What a bunch of rancour

Performance manager Netscout has warned mobile network operators to expect an onslaught of multi-vector attacks focused on dragging them down with botnet and app-layer direct-path attacks that target lone telcos rather customers of comms service providers (CSPs). The DDoS attacks on wireless telecoms increased by 79% since 2020, for some reason. The DDoS Threat Intelligence Report says DDoS alerts created 436 petabits of network traffic and, on one day in 2022 telco networks carried more than 75 trillion malignant packets. Application-layer attacks have risen by 487% since 2019. Direct-path attacks also surged in 2022, particularly in the second half of the year and made up more than 50% of all DDoS incursions reported.

Why is this happening to telcos? There are now more than a billion websites in use around the world. The Netscout report identifies the pro-Russian group Killnet as being a major originator of such attacks and notes that, prior to the invasion of Ukraine, Killnet attacks knocked out the country’s critical financial, government and media sites. “DDoS attacks threaten organisations worldwide and challenge their ability to deliver critical services,” said Richard Hummel, threat intelligence lead at Netscout, “with multi-terabit-per-second attacks now commonplace and bad actors’ arsenals continuing to grow in sophistication and complexity, organisations need a strategy that can quickly adapt to the dynamic nature of the DDoS threat landscape.”

The report says the US national security sector was hit by a 16,815% increase in attacks, thanks to the Killnet gang. Last year enterprises had 350,000 security-related alerts with botnet involvement, said Netscout analysts, who tracked over 1.35 million bots from malware families like Mirai, Meris and Dvinis. By contrast, service providers were ‘carpet bombed’, where they received approximately 60,000 alerts where bots were present. This technique simultaneously targets entire IP address ranges and increased by 110% between the first and the second half of 2022, with most attacks against ISP networks.

For some reason the optical instrument and lens manufacturing sector for Europe, the Middle East and Africa was targeted with a barrage of DDoS attacks that created a 14,137% increase in traffic, albeit against one major distributor, which reported 6,000 attacks over four months.

The new Netscout report was compiled from data collected by its ATLAS network. ATLAS was built over two decades through work with more than 500 ISPs to create a sensor network that provides visibility into more than 400 Tbit/s of international transit every second of every day. Thus ATLAS collects DDoS attack statistics from an average of 93 countries daily, encompassing over 50% of the world’s internet traffic.