News roundup February 2017

A final roundup of February’s broadband news and developments:

• The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) launched a new Digital Strategy to “create a world-leading digital economy that works for everyone”; also see Culture Secretary Karen Bradley's launch speech. Further analysis to follow in a future post.
• Further to this month’s earlier update on cyber security research and analysis, Malwarebytes and Trend Micro also published overviews of the cyber security landscape and developments in 2016, again focussing on the rise of ransomware and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Also see Network World’s coverage of how Level 3 Communications tracks cyber attacks and notifies users of infected computers.
• Further to this month’s 5G update, Network World published an update of 5G standardisation developments.
• TeleGeography published a new FAQ on undersea cables and their importance to global communications. This interview with the author of the FAQ is also worth a listen: he highlights the huge impact Pokemon Go had on global network traffic; player traffic quickly surged to 50 times its initial target, ten times the initial worst case estimate (more on this here). TeleGeography predicts there will be more instances of such sudden, unpredictable growth as new applications develop and come to market (also see Network World’s overview of the three biggest challenges facing augmented reality).
• A new report, Rebooting Learning for the Digital Age, published by the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI), calls on university leaders to embrace new technology to meet the challenges faced by the higher education sector. Also see coverage from Out-Law.