Network failures hit PayPal

Two consecutive network failures in a data centre used by online-payment processing company PayPal caused nearly all of its customers to have trouble logging in and sending or receiving payments through the service last week, notes DataCenter Dynamics.

The company's CTO Scott Guilfoyle wrote in a blog post that the first outage lasted longer than one hour before it was fully resolved and the second one, which came about two hours after resolution of the first one, lasted for about 50 minutes before full resolution.

“We take our commitment seriously to provide our customers a safer and more convenient way to pay and be paid online,” Guilfoyle wrote, also apologising to those affected.

While Wi-Fi has increasingly become the primary choice for office worker connectivity, it may be some time before it replaces wired networks altogether, according to panellists at the Interop conference, held last week in New York, says PC World.

In many cases, office wireless networks are more widely used than the wired networks in place, the panellists agreed. Which leads to the question: Do we need Ethernet-based LANs at all?

"The primary problem I see is that companies don't see their wireless networks as the primary edge, whereas users do," said Austin Hawthorne, a senior consulting systems engineer for Aruba Networks, during one panel on the future of Wi-Fi.

Associated Press reports claim that Japanese telco Softbank Corp has floated a plan to build a fibre-optic network spanning the country to replace existing copper-wire telephone lines as part of a JPY500 billion ($6.2 billion) joint venture with rival telcos Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp (NTT) and KDDI Corp, reports TeleGeography.

Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son is quoted as saying he has submitted proposals to the government to build a new broadband super highway in Japan.

Son's scheme would entail replacing more than 40 million conventional POTS-based lines with fibre over a period - of probably five years, the CEO said.