The 2026 Cisco Networking Academy Partner Conference in Atlanta celebrated the program's impact across the US, Canada, and Marshall Islands, having reached 3.4 million students with 96% securing new career or educational opportunities. The event honored Premier+ partners representing the top 5% of Academic Support Centers, recognized 'Be the Bridge' award recipients for inclusion and innovation efforts, and highlighted instructor stories demonstrating the program's human impact in bridging the digital skills gap amid AI-driven workforce transformation.
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The 6 GHz radio band (5,925–7,125 MHz) has become a flashpoint between the Wi-Fi and cellular industries as both claim it is essential for their next-generation technologies. The US has allocated the entire band to unlicensed Wi-Fi use, China has reserved it entirely for licensed cellular/5G-6G, and the EU is pursuing a hybrid split. India and the UK remain undecided, with the UK exploring dynamic spectrum sharing via automated frequency coordination. The divergence risks creating three incompatible wireless models across the world's largest economies, complicating hardware design and raising manufacturing costs. Key decisions are expected to hinge on the ITU World Radiocommunication Conference in 2027.
Netris, a network automation startup, has raised $15M in a Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz. The company provides hardware-accelerated network automation software that runs on switches, helping AI neocloud operators reduce time-to-market by automating setup, configuration, and multi-tenancy. Unlike traditional SDN, Netris uses deterministic algorithms rather than AI to handle the high-throughput demands of GPU clusters. The platform is vendor-agnostic and already deployed across 35+ GPU clusters totaling roughly one million GPUs, with customers including Lightning AI, Foxconn, and HPE. Nvidia has also recommended Netris to its customers. The funding will be used to hire engineers and sales staff, expand hardware vendor support, and enhance its automation algorithms.
A look at why dedicated Wi-Fi access points like the Ubiquiti UniFi AP AC PRO are a better choice than ISP-provided routers for home networks. The post explains the benefits of PoE-powered APs — flexible placement, VLAN support, and seamless roaming — and highlights a Prime Day deal bringing the UniFi AP AC PRO down to $125. It also touches on use cases like smart home IoT devices, NAS, home labs, and Home Assistant automations.
Netris, a Santa Clara startup specializing in GPU data center network automation, has raised $15M in a Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz. The company's platform automates setup, configuration, and operations for neocloud operators, addressing the complex networking challenges of GPU clusters — including multi-tenancy isolation and hardware-accelerated configuration across thousands of switches. Netris reports 800% annual recurring revenue growth and over 35 live GPU cluster deployments totaling roughly one million GPUs, with customers including Lightning AI, HPE, and TensorWave. Notably, the platform uses deterministic algorithms rather than AI, as the CEO argues network configuration requires repeatability, not creativity. Funding will go toward hiring, hardware vendor support expansion, and platform development.
Cisco has introduced AI Troubleshooting for Industrial Networks, an on-premises ambient agent designed to reduce downtime on factory floors. The agent continuously monitors industrial network switches, detects faults, diagnoses root causes using deterministic logic, and provides step-by-step remediation guidance to OT technicians — without requiring CLI expertise. It covers common issues like cable/fiber faults, endpoint offline events, PoE failures, switch power supply failures, and CPU/memory instability. The goal is to close the gap between OT technicians who know physical systems but lack networking expertise, and network experts who are too few and stretched thin, ultimately compressing mean time to resolution and reducing costly production downtime.
Early benchmarks of the Linux 7.2 development kernel on an AMD EPYC 8635P (Sorano) server reveal unexpected localhost network performance improvements. TCP throughput and QUIC performance improved noticeably compared to Linux 7.1, while UDP remained unchanged. Sockperf also showed lower latency. A likely explanation is a change in fs/select.c switching the poll implementation from free_page() to the kmalloc() API, which improves scalability. The stress-ng micro-benchmarks confirmed poll performance is several times faster in Linux 7.2. Notably, CPU power consumption on the EPYC 8635P was slightly lower despite the performance gains. These improvements are not AMD-specific and should benefit other hardware as well.
Using the collapse of Schwinn Bicycle Company as a case study, this piece argues that leaders operate within two networks: a visible managed network of direct reports and peers, and an invisible second network of weak ties. Drawing on Mark Granovetter's 1973 'Strength of Weak Ties' research and AnnaLee Saxenian's comparison of Silicon Valley vs. Route 128, it explains why strong-tie networks produce informationally redundant feedback loops while weak ties bridge structural holes and deliver novel signal. Schwinn's executives failed not from lack of intelligence but from a closed advisory loop that couldn't surface the mountain bike revolution happening in their own backyard. The post advocates for deliberately cultivating weak ties through peer groups and periodic outreach, offering diagnostic questions to assess whether your second network is alive or atrophying.
A hands-on review of the WisdPi 10G Ethernet Expansion Card for Framework laptops reveals significant USB-C bandwidth complexity. The Realtek RTL8159 chip requires USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 (20 Gbps) to achieve full 10 Gbps speeds, but many Framework laptops don't deliver that bandwidth on all ports, capping real-world throughput well below 8 Gbps. Linux performance is worse than Windows without the proprietary Realtek driver, and the driver failed to compile on Ubuntu 26.04 with kernel 7.x. Even under ideal conditions with the Realtek driver on Windows, speeds top out around 9.4 Gbps. A notable thermal issue was also found — the module surface reaches nearly 70°C under load, making lap use inadvisable. For most users, the $40 2.5 Gbps Ethernet card is recommended; the $99 10G card is only worth it for specific high-bandwidth use cases.