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Keep up-to-date with all the latest news, articles, event and product updates posted on Developing Telecoms.
Subscribe to our FREE weekly email newsletters for the latest telecom info in developing and emerging markets globally.
Enthusiast founded Dutch startup, Usafe, is setting out to reclaim online privacy from tech giants and give it back to the user
Tell us about your startup
Usafe is a tech startup that focuses on managing digital identities to restore privacy to individuals from the grip of technology companies.
The company intends to achieve this by providing individuals with a clear view of the flow of their data. Usafe’s approach is based on three fundamental concepts: zero-knowledge proof, decentralized identity, and ongoing user education.
Established in 2019 by a talented team of experts, Usafe seeks to collaborate with established identity providers, such as banks, insurance companies, and governments, to enhance personal online privacy and establish an innovative approach to online security.
What is your USP?
Usafe’s Unique Selling Proposition (USP) can be summarized as follows:
What is your relationship with the telecom sector?
Telecom companies have a large customer base and have established trust with their clients, providing access to verified customer data. Usafe’s solution enables telecom companies to efficiently enter the competitive digital identity market.
By leveraging their existing customer data and relationship, telecom companies can offer digital identity solutions that are secure and trustworthy, thereby expanding their product portfolio.
How have you got to your current stage of development?
Our current stage of development is the result of a combination of passion for technology and problem-solving. The company was founded by individuals who are driven to create innovative solutions to real-world challenges. Currently, we have developed a working prototype that is ready to be deployed on actual infrastructure and integrated with relevant stakeholders.
Why did you establish the business?
Usafe was established as a response to the founders’ personal experiences with data breaches and privacy violations. Recognizing the need for a solution to these challenges, the founders leveraged their technical expertise as engineers to design and develop a product that would address these problems. Their experience and expertise in solving technical problems, coupled with a deep understanding of the challenges faced by individuals in protecting their personal information, led to the creation of Usafe – a product aimed at providing users with secure and private digital identities. The company was founded with a strong focus on making a positive impact on the world by helping people regain control over their personal information.
Who inspired you?
We were inspired by the experiences of those around us who have suffered from data breaches and privacy violations. We saw the frustration, anger, and helplessness that resulted from these incidents and were motivated to find a solution that would empower individuals and give them back control over their personal information. The company was inspired by the many individuals who have been impacted by these challenges and sought to make a positive difference in the world by addressing this problem.
What does the future hold for your business?
Regarding the future of Usafe, we strongly believe that the decentralization of digital identities is the way to go. We are proud to be part of a company that is at the forefront of this industry and we are excited to see where it will go in the future. We know that this market will become more competitive over time, but we are confident that the benefits our product brings to internet users make it all worth it. We are committed to continuing to improve our solution, so that we can provide the best possible digital identity experience for our users.
COMPANY CV
Headquarters: The Hague, Netherlands
URL: https://www.usafe.digital/blog
CO-FOUNDER: Aleksandr Arakelov
Usafe will showcase their solutions at the Total Telecom Congress Startup Village at the event in The RAI this November. If you would like your startup to participate, visit the website to find out more: totaltele.com/congress
ST Engineering iDirect’s leading Mx-DMA® MRC waveform technology will enable Mexican connectivity service provider Aitelecom/APCO Networks (Aitelecom) to support services on its new MicroGEO satellites that will be built by satellite manufacturer, Astranis Space Technologies (Astranis). The satellites and ground infrastructure will deliver critical connectivity for 4G cellular backhaul and enterprise services across Mexico and part of Central America. Deployed on Aitelecom’s existing Dialog® platform, the services will be made available to hundreds of sites across the country and part of Central America.
This agreement further strengthens the long-standing relationship between ST Engineering iDirect and Aitelecom and creates a roadmap for the future which will see the companies evolve together to meet Aitelecom’s current and future requirements.
The demand for cellular backhaul services across Mexico has seen a major surge in recent years. In 2022, more than 74 percent of mobile phone users in Mexico accessed the internet through their mobile phone. By 2027, it is projected that this will rise to around 88 percent [1].
ST Engineering iDirect’s Mx-DMA MRC return technology and GTP acceleration was a critical consideration for Aitelecom as it will enable the company to serve a myriad of use cases in a single return link without making tradeoffs between speed, efficiency and scale. This also lowers their total cost of ownership, whilst minimizing network configuration complexity and creating flexible connectivity for all LTE/4G types of sites. Mx-DMA MRC will empower Aitelecom to scale its services while simplifying its operations, sharing capacity seamlessly and very efficiently amongst its user terminals, and satisfying the most demanding throughput requirements presented by its MNO and enterprise customers.
The MicroGEO satellites from U.S.-based Astranis are small and highly capable spacecraft that are designed and manufactured at a rapid pace in comparison with larger GEO satellites, and at a lower cost. The satellites are slated for launch in Q3 2024 and will enable Aitelecom to go to market rapidly, delivering high-speed, flexible services with advanced ground infrastructure to match.
“We are excited and motivated to take the next step in our company’s evolution towards a fully vertically integrated service provider controlling our own destiny in terms of capacity, technology and service delivery,” said Orlando Castillo, CEO of Aitelecom. “With ST Engineering iDirect´s Mx-DMA MRC as the focal technology, we are confident that service continuity, quality of service and unparalleled support will be paramount in the delivery of our solutions to our customers.”
“We are excited to partner with Aitelecom and ST Engineering iDirect to offer an end-to-end, managed service for our customers,” said Astranis Chief Commercial Officer, Doug Abts. “This offering will allow us to expand high-speed coverage throughout Mexico, offering a turnkey service for an affordable price.”
“The sheer flexibility of Mx-DMA MRC will enable Aitelcom to serve the burgeoning markets in Mexico and Central America in the most operationally and cost optimal manner,” said Darren Ludington, Regional Vice President, Americas at ST Engineering iDirect. “Extending our commitment and partnerships with Aitelecom allows them to augment their service delivery to reach new parts of the region.”
[1] Source: Statista
This Industry Viewpoint was authored by Clark Stevenson, Senior Director Customer Success, IQGeo
The last few years have tested and proved our deep reliance on the telecom industry. With growing consumer demands on internet infrastructure, broadband operators have had to innovate fast to keep pace with demand and technology. Fiber broadband promises homes and offices the high-speed internet needed to … [visit site to read more]
Keep up-to-date with all the latest news, articles, event and product updates posted on Developing Telecoms.
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Awaretag built its sensor technology and AI driven online software, to make it easy for anyone to understand where they can save money, live in a damp free home and plan for a net zero future.
Tell us about your startup?
Our technology is for Housing Associations, Councils, Retrofit teams, Surveyors, Energy Advisors and residents, looking to understand how the fabric of the building and habits will make a home better.
You only need 8 sensors in a house (one in each room), and our software builds a 3D picture of temperature, humidity, ventilation and mould risk areas for the whole space over time.
We enable customers to see into corners of the building that we previously hidden by cupboards, beds, sofas, or difficult to assess as they could only take a snap shot in time. With our software and sensors, you can see the stages of mould growth, insulation and heating performance over time, how well the ventilation is working, and whether the environment is dangerous to health.
You can act before risks become a crisis. Plan improvements without the guesswork. Be certain that improvements have worked.
We are based in Bristol but are national in our reach. We are working with some of the largest Housing Associations and Councils in the UK including Sunderland, Leeds, Liverpool, London, Bristol, Leicestershire, Sussex. We are also partnered with one of the largest Energy Advisory and Social Impact Charities helping solve the problems detected by our technology.
We have won recognition from Government Digital Services for designing accessible systems that help the most vulnerable, and have recently won funding from Northern Gas Networks to find the link between the quality of homes and respiratory conditions.
Why did you establish the business?
I started the business to tackle the problem of mould, damp and poor energy efficiency that affects the health and wellbeing of over 2 million households in the UK every year.
Part of the problem was a lack of understanding of how buildings perform over time with people in them. This resulted in confusion, reliance on old remedies that didn’t work in a changing world, and in the worst cases, people being left to feel they are to blame and putting up with it. There was no way to accurately and easily, measure and predict the likely causes and pinpoint what to do.
As a result, Housing Providers are repeating mould and damp repairs every year that can eat into 20% of their budgets. Surveyors are only able to take a snap shot of the lifecycle of the home as traditional methods are costly, time consuming and intrusive. Retrofit teams continue to worry whether the £100,000’s spent on insulating properties would create additional repairs costs due to the build-up of moisture. Energy Charities, are over worked trying to provide personalised assistance but with no data.
What is your USP?
For us, pictures paint a thousand words. We have taken complex science and turned it into online 3D digital twins of the insulation and heating performance of the home, education on ways to improve it, and personalised help should you need it.
Our ‘test and predict kit’ is delivered in the post. Anyone can use it. This makes it a scalable solution that can speed up tackling the 2m homes that have mould and damp, and the 27m that need retrofit improvements
We developed the software over 3 years working with AI, Robotics and Networks specialists from Leeds, Huddersfield and Sheffield Universities. We designed edge processing to reduce the amount of wireless connectivity to servers and preserve privacy. This means our solution can work in no coverage areas, low bandwidth (LoRaWAN) and broadband (LTE, WiFi). Scaling the technology to any network in any country is now possible regardless of bandwidth availability.
Above all else, we design for people. We help people see for their own eyes where a problem is, what may be causing it, and the options for making it better. We design UI and UX journeys to be inclusive and personalised for everyone regardless of skill level. The more people understand, the easier it is to resolve a problem and make the improvement sustainable.
Our approach is recognised for delivering results and it helped us pass the Government Digital Services 14 point Alpha Assessment in 2021 whilst competing against an established global brand.
What is your relationship with the telecom sector?
The team has a long combined history in telecoms. From the earliest circuit switched data days, through to 2G, 3G, 868, LoRaWAN, Sigfox, BLE, 4G, 5G. We have always looked for ways to optimise electronics, data processing, power consumption, and network availability so the customer and users can still get deep insights regardless of the network.
We are working with Toshiba, Leeds City Council, Baltic Broadband and BAI communications using their LoRaWAN networks across Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool and Sunderland. Together we are proving that you can get high fidelity, accurate data from every room in a home using a narrow band, low cost network.
This is good for Housing Associations and Councils looking to invest in low cost networks that can enable new digital services for all residents including the most vulnerable.
How have you got to your current stage of development?
Our journey started in 2020 where we won an Govtech/SBRI funded 18 month project to work with Leeds City Council Social Housing team and their tenants to find new ways to enable proactive repairs and improvements in Health and Wellbeing.
From the start, our philosophy was that monitoring of homes would not work without the consent of people. We chose to take an ‘informed consent’ approach which meant designing hardware that people would love to have in their home, a data collection and sharing policy that was transparent, and an installation approach where tenants requested the solution and could put it in themselves.
COVID 19 lockdowns created an environment where we had to prove that our approach could deliver a remote management service from installation to diagnosis to remedy. We partnered with a local charity to provide the on-the-ground advice following the diagnosis from our technology.
It was like a health check kit delivered in the post, diagnosis performed by the tenant and our technology, with advice given by experts online, on the phone or in person.
This inclusive approach saved installation costs, and ensured people were part of discovering the problem and being part of the solution. Our approach ensured we passed the Government Digital Services Alpha Assessment.
In 2022, we won funded places on the BAI Communications and Sunderland City Council IoT/5G accelerator programme, and the Toshiba/Umbrella programme. Since those initial programmes, we are now developing further funded pilot projects in the social housing and care home sectors.
In the same year we were selected by Disruptive Innovators Network to develop funded pilot projects with some of the largest Housing Associations in the UK. We are using our technology to discover defects in the fabric of the building and the impacts that daily activity has on the risk of mould and damp.
We also won funding from Northern Gas Networks to deliver a 15 month project in collaboration with Green Doctors Yorkshire that would measure and predict the health of 1000 homes, and measure the impact that improvements made on health and wellbeing.
Our growth has come from grants and organic development of pilots. We have developed value in hardware, prediction algorithms, software and cloud services to solve big problems in social housing and the construction sectors.
We now understand what elements provide most value for our customers and the business, and have developed a recurring revenue model that we are testing with customers. We are preparing to scale the business and will be looking for seed funding.
Who Inspired you?
I have always made sure we are diverse team. Ideas, experiences, capabilities, age, origins are all important when trying to create an innovative business. We’ve had PhD students working with us who have ended up working for Dyson! Residents who have enjoyed working with us so much they want to be the voice of the company. Surveyors giving up their time regularly to help us.
Our drive comes from individuals within Housing Providers and Charities who wake up every day and want to do the right thing in extraordinary circumstances. I enjoy the trust created in every encounter and creating environments where everyone can learn from each other, support each other and grow.
There is still a way to go, and more inspiring people to meet.
What does the future hold for you business?
We are expanding our technology to enable rapid assessments of building fabric for net zero planning. Our prediction algorithms are ideally suited to running ‘what if’ scenarios on our Digital Twins of homes. We see we can help investment groups achieve certainty before providing the £100millions needed to improve 27m homes by 2050.
We are partnering more. We have developed our technology and cloud services using the OpenAPI framework. Our plug and play philosophy from the devices delivered to the home, the simplified connectivity to our cloud, through to serving up calculations and models through APIs to third parties, makes it easy to work with some of the largest technology and services companies in the world.
We are partnering with a global communications infrastructure company and a global technology company to deliver housing management and care home management solutions at scale.
Awaretag are one of the organisations you will mehttps://awaretag.com/et in the Startup Village at Connected North 2023, 17 & 18 April at Manchester Central. Find out more at totaltele.com/connectednorth . To learn more about Awaretag, visit awaretag.com
The world of server management is always evolving, and with that comes new and improved features for administrators. Bicom Systems’ SERVERware 4.4 comes with plenty of new features that can make the life of a server administrator much easier. In this article, we will take a look at what’s new in SERVERware 4.4.
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In today’s digital age, it is essential for VoIP service providers to ensure a secure connection between end users and their VoIP solution/PBXs, and to protect their servers from SIP brute-force attacks. To help with this task, we’re introducing a new and improved sipPROT feature that comes with several enhancements to make your network more secure:
One of the most significant additions to sipPROT is the GeoIP blocking feature. This feature allows you to block or allow IP addresses based on their geographical location. This means that you can restrict access to your network from specific countries, for example, to prevent attacks from known malicious countries. This feature is easy to use and administrators can quickly configure GeoIP blocking with a few clicks.
The new enhancements in sipPROT make it easier for administrators to manage and debug issues related to sipPROT-blocked IPs. With the GeoIP blocking and API for Geo IP lookups, you can quickly identify any IP addresses that may be causing problems and take appropriate action. This makes it easier to maintain a secure network and respond to security threats quickly and efficiently.
SERVERware’s built-in Authoritative DNS with NAT support is a game-changer for businesses looking for a reliable and flexible DNS solution. With this feature, you can easily assign a domain name or subdomain to your SERVERware cluster, and it will resolve the IP address of your VPS by its name, providing seamless access to your customers.
But what happens when you deploy a standard Network Address Translation (NAT) setup? In such a setup, a one-to-one NAT is utilized, meaning that for each VPS private IP, a public IP address is assigned. This is where the newly added option to set the external IP address comes into play.
With the external IP address option, you can now add information about the public IP addresses of your VPSs. And for each external A record request from the public network, the SERVERware DNS will respond with a record containing the external IP. This feature is especially useful for geo-redundant setups where the DNS NAPTR and SRV records are used to move VPSs around.
Another benefit of the external IP address option is that it is available for the GRS-enabled VPS, ensuring that the VPS’s functionality is not affected during a takeover.
In today’s world of cyber threats, it’s critical to ensure the safety and privacy of sensitive information exchanged between users and websites or between two systems. This is where Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) comes into play, using encryption algorithms to scramble data in transit, thereby preventing hackers from accessing it.
To help you manage SSL certificates on SERVERware Web Console, we’ve introduced a new page with all the details you need. From this page, you can upload a certificate manually, generate a Certificate Signing Request (CSR), and even obtain and update an SSL certificate via the Automatic Certificate Management Environment (ACME) protocol.
Generating a CSR is a straightforward process that requires you to send the issuing Certificate Authority (CA) your public key and provide relevant information about the requester. SERVERware Web Console makes it easy for you to do this from the GUI. Simply select a domain and generate the CSR and select a private key for the domain to use for the purchase of an SSL certificate.
If you prefer to use an SSL certificate from a provider other than the self-signed one that is the default, you can easily upload the .PEM file and (optionally) the private key to SERVERware Web Console. Once you press “Upload,” the system will automatically switch to the newly added certificate.
The administrator can obtain a free SSL certificate with just a few clicks by providing a domain and an email. The certificate will be installed automatically on a SERVERware instance. This feature saves time and makes it easier to maintain SERVERware SSL certificates.
We’ve also extended our automated SSL certificate installation to support CAs that require External Account Binding (EAB) for registering ACME accounts (ZeroSSL, Google Trust Services, etc.).
In situations where a SERVERware instance is not publicly available or a wildcard domain is needed (*.example.org), you can still obtain a certificate using the DNS challenge. This can be accomplished with a manual DNS setup or by using SERVERware CoreDNS functionality.
If the private key of a certificate is compromised, you have the ability to revoke it. This option is available only if the certificate was generated from Let’s Encrypt, ZeroSSL, and other similar free providers via the automated activation method. After a revocation, SERVERware will switch to a self-signed certificate unless you choose to keep the current certificate.
If you need to renew an active SSL certificate, it’s possible to start the process manually. This option is only available if the certificate was generated from Let’s Encrypt, ZeroSSL, and other similar free providers via the automated activation method. The administrator will also receive a persistent notification banner 7 days before the certificate’s expiration date.
In conclusion, SSL is essential for securing sensitive information exchanged between users and websites or between two systems. With SERVERware Web Console, managing SSL certificates is easy and straightforward, allowing you to maximize your web security with just a few clicks.
As the world of technology advances, the need for a robust monitoring system becomes increasingly crucial. To address this need, SERVERware has introduced a new Audit log, which provides essential details about the actions performed in the system. The Audit log is accessible under the Reports sub-menu and is a valuable tool for SERVERware administrators and support personnel in troubleshooting or analyzing SERVERware activities.
The real value of the Audit log lies in its ability to improve diagnostics and decision-making. The log is directly connected to the dashboard’s recent activity widget, which allows quick inspection and reaction when expanded. This feature can be a game-changer for administrators who need to quickly resolve any issues that may arise.
SERVERware 4.4 introduced several new features aimed at enhancing monitoring and improving backup management. BSSUP Session Recording has been added to record SSH access and sessions with all executed commands and output. The backup management process has been made easier with the introduction of the ‘Remove VPS Backups’ option for keeping backup servers clean and organized. The restore process for deleted VPSs has been redesigned and now offers a dropdown list of restore points. Additionally, the backup and restore management has been improved with the ability to sort the list by VPS name and dataset size. These new features aim to simplify the monitoring and management process for SERVERware administrators and support personnel.
SERVERware 4.4 version also resolves many bug fixes to provide a more stable and efficient experience. With the introduction of new features aimed at enhancing monitoring and improving backup management, as well as the resolution of various bugs, this update is a significant step forward in the overall performance and reliability of the SERVERware platform.
For any questions or concerns regarding the SERVERware 4.4 update, our partners are encouraged to contact us for further support. The release notes for SERVERware 4.4 can be downloaded from the Bicom Systems website for a detailed explanation of the new features and bug fixes included in this release.
Multiple interesting deployments of infrastructure and software from around the world this week: … [visit site to read more]
Infinera has been busy on multiple subsea route lately, with three interesting announcements so far this week. … [visit site to read more]
