We’re different. Remember that. We’re insightful, and remember that too, and remember that a big reason why we’re insightful is that we’re different. Andover Intel is based on a simple principle, which is that to understand tech, you have to understand what tech buyers are doing, expecting, justifying. We’ve established a user contact program that…
Another question that my series of blogs on telecom standards raised with telcos themselves is “Why couldn’t NFV have fixed these problems?” On the surface, the concept of virtualizing network functions, which is what I advocated in THIS blog, would seem to be what NFV aimed to do. So why didn’t it work? The easy…
Mainframes, monoliths, hybrid cloud, AI…all these are terms that we kick around, but one company, IBM, embodies them all in a way that no other does. IBM is also doing pretty darn well these days. In the last 6 months, it’s stock has gone up over 20%, and in the last year over 50%. Is…
What, if anything, can we say about the value of AI to network operators, to telcos in particular? Is it transformational, justified, or simply applicable? Are there any missions that fall clearly into the “gain” category? I’ve dug through almost 200 comments made by operators on the topic, and this is what I’ve found. First,…
Many of you who read my blog know that Andover Intel has a users-only email link and we encourage consumers of technology to comment, ask questions, debate, or whatever with complete confidentiality. My blogs on standards in general and 6G in particular generated emails from 51 of 88 operators who have commented, as users, and…
OK, let’s face facts. The whole of telecom standards is broken, and something radical is needed to fix it. You only have to read the story of 5G, and reflect on past initiatives like frame relay and ATM, or the IPsphere concept, or Network Function Virtualization (NFV) to see how badly the industry is served…
There are clearly a lot of things going on in the telecom space. For well over a decade, operators have been experiencing erosion in revenue per bit. Some, particularly in areas like the EU where competition is fierce, have sought subsidies from big-tech firms to compensate for the traffic they add, traffic users themselves are…
Enterprises, asked what the relevant 6G features could be, will say “low latency” almost 3:1 over all other options combined. But why is latency relevant? The answer, interestingly, of almost half those who cite it reduces to “I don’t really know”. The rest say that it would be relevant to promote the availability of hosted…
There has, for years, been a potential for the cloud providers’ networks to create competition for enterprise networks based on MPLS VPNs. I noted in an earlier blog that enterprises were seriously looking at reducing their WAN costs by using SD-WAN and/or SASE. This obviously generated an opportunity for cloud providers to offer WAN services,…
In my blog yesterday about the future of operator network services and infrastructure, I mentioned the possibility (well, maybe “hope” would be more accurate) that the 6G initiatives might address some issues in a useful way. Since we’re at least five years from a solid idea of what 6G is going to do (we might…
I went back over some of my own writing a decade or two ago, and it made me wonder how much we could hope to uncover about the future of network infrastructure for service providers a decade or more from now. Everyone loves transformations; they generate interest for us and clicks for publications and advertisers….