Author: Tom Nolle

The modern view of a virtual private network is clearly trying to balance the “virtual” part and the “private” part.  Private networks based on dedicated per-tenant facilities were the rule up to sometime in the 1980s, when IP VPNs came on the scene and introduced shared-tenant VPNs.  Now the VPN space seems to be moving…

We need a new way to look at information technology, given the number of different things that are driving change.  The categories like “hardware” and “software” don’t suit a virtual world where it’s actually rather difficult to tell what or where something is.  Talking about “computing power” is complicated when the computer is virtual and…

One of the 5G features that gets lots of attention is network slicing.  Most of the press on the topic has been at least positive if not gushing, but operators have some specific questions about the business case, and more about technology issues.  The big question on the technology side is how network slicing might…

Verizon certainly raised a ruckus in the industry with their views on consolidation.  The sense of their CEO’s comments was that Verizon was open to a merger that offered them content ownership, and that says a lot about the industry overall.  Here we have a giant telco saying that without content ownership their position is…

There is no shortage of things we inherit from legacy telecom.  An increasing number of them are millstones around the neck of transformation, and many of those that are drags are related to management and SLA practices.  Those who hanker for the stringent days of TDM SLAs should consider going back in time, but remember…

We tend to think of transformation as something that network operators, particularly telcos, have to go through.  In point of fact, transformation, meaning technology transformation, is going to happen to everyone, buyers and sellers, operators and enterprises.  That truth leaves two questions—what kind of transformation will happen, and how will the players respond to the…

One of the questions certain to arise from discussions of service lifecycle management is how VNFs are managed.  The pat answer to this is “similar to the way that the physical network functions (PNFs) that the VNFs replace were managed.”  Actually, it’s not so pat a response, either.  It is very desirable that management practices…

Service modeling has to start somewhere, and both the “normal” bottom-up approach and the software-centric top-down approach have their plusses and minuses.  Starting at the bottom invites creating an implementation-specific approach that misses a lot of issues and benefits.  Starting at the top ignores the reality that operators have an enormous sunk cost in network…

Yesterday I talked about service transformation through lifecycle management, starting with how to expose traditional networking services and features through intent models.  Today, I’m going to talk about the other side of the divide—service modeling.  Later, we’ll talk about the boundary function between the two, and still later will take up other topics like how…

There seem to be a lot of forces driving, suggesting, or inducing major changes in the networking industry.  As indicators, we have mergers at the service provider, equipment vendor, and content provider level, and we have proposed breakups of hardware and software at the equipment level.  Another hardware player broke itself to death, selling pieces…