Author: Tom Nolle

Like all tech, 5G and 6G have followed the “all-to-positive-to-absolutely-negative” PR path. I’ve arguably been on the negative side of the middle ground for both, from the first, and that’s likely the closest thing to a default right assessment we could give anything new in tech. AI? Quantum computing? They could both expect the “G’s”…

How do we come to terms with AI? Where do we find helpful information, who can we trust, what should we look for, will it meet ROI requirements, should we apply special compliance rules to it? There are a lot of questions enterprises have, and the one constant is that of almost 400 enterprises who…

There’s now, and then there’s “then”. Most of you can probably recall when to make a success of a broadband service, you had to have linear video delivery. Video killed the radio star, so the song goes, but it made broadband possible…then. Now, linear video may be an albatross, and that comes straight from confidential…

Why would companies like Google, Meta, and Microsoft want to invest so much in AI infrastructure? Wall Street looks at the rise in capex as a threat to future profits. Many, myself included, wonder whether all their AI hype has proved is that if you give something away, people will take it. So, do these…

The recent Starlink service outage has raised yet again the issue of software failures in network outages. While over 80% of enterprises and slightly under two-thirds of operators say the largest source of outage-minutes in their networks is human error, most of these will admit that there’s an underlying question of whether software should have…

The biggest problem with AI agents, say enterprises, is that all you can easily find about them is trivial and wrong. Yes, it’s possible to infer some useful truths from basic agentic comments online, but the details that a savvy planner would need to make agent decisions and deployments is missing. One AI type told…

One of the hot topics in telecom these days is the role AI could play in managing opex. I blogged about this a bit recently, and got some LinkedIn comments. The operative presumption is that telecom could cut jobs through the use of AI, and Light Reading said that “The combined workforce of the 20…

A bit ago, I commented on a LinkedIn post that asked whether we are repeating, with AI agents, the mistakes of NFV. My comment was “The issues here are deeper, I think. The essential problem with NFV was that operations is inherently an event-driven, stateful, process and the architecture mandated by the NFV ISG wasn’t…

Here’s an important truth for you; for telcos, AI is dangerous. And no, it’s not the security issues or hallucinations, or the fact that the technology is expensive, it’s that the “promise of AI” is, for telcos, largely a trap. Few, if any, of the initiatives that are promoted for the telco community have any…

Having spent last week on the network operator/telco space, it’s time to take a look at the enterprise side, and in particular the trends and developments in cloud computing and AI. Wall Street’s survey of CIOs shows that cloud spending growth slowed significantly so far this year, perhaps to a third of last year’s rate…