Author: Tom Nolle

I blogged about cable and telco broadband last week, which leaves us a third significant broadband source—satellite.  The advantages of satellite broadband are obvious; you can get it anywhere in the world.  The disadvantages have been equally obvious—higher cost and performance issues on at least some delay-sensitive applications.  There are rumors that NFV or 5G…

The Ciena announcement of what they call Liquid Spectrum has raised again the prospect of a holistic vision of network capacity management and connectivity management that redefines traditional OSI-modeled protocol layers.  It also opens the door for a seismic shift in capex from Layers 2 and 3 downward toward the optical layer.  It could jump-start…

Today I want to take up the remaining issue with edge-centric and functional programming for event processing, both for IoT and NFV.  That issue is control of distributed state and stateless processes.  Barring changes in the landscape, this will be the last of my series of blogs on this topic. As always, we need to…

Most of you will recall that there has been a persistent goal to make OSS/BSS “event-driven”.  Suppose we were to accept that was the right approach.  Could we then apply some of the edge-computing and IoT principles of software structure and organization of work to the OSS/BSS?  Let’s take a look at what would happen…

It seems possible, based on the results of the MWC show, to speculate a bit on what infrastructure and service considerations are likely to arise out of the 5G specs.  “Speculate” is the key word here; I’ve already noted that the show didn’t address the key realities of 5G, IoT, or much anything else.  I…

The iconic MWC conference is now pretty much history.  The big announcements have been made, the attendees have largely exhausted themselves (the exhibitors certainly have!), and it’s time to take stock and decide whether anything important was really said and shown.  In terms of point announcements, it’s rare for something huge to come out at…

When you have an architecture that set the standard for NFV, what do you to for an encore?  AT&T’s answer to that question is “Network 3.0 Indigo” or in short terms, just “Indigo”.  It’s another of those huge concepts that’s difficult to describe or to understand, and its sheer scope is certain to create healthy…

Operators have been fascinated by the public cloud opportunity, and new initiatives like that of Orange Business Services seem to promise that this fascination could be gaining some traction in the real world.  But Verizon at the same time is clearly pulling back from its public cloud computing commitments.  What’s really going on with operator…

It would be fair for you to wonder whether the notion of intent-based service modeling for transformed telco infrastructure is anything more than a debate on software architecture.  In fact, that might be a very critical question because we’re really not addressing, so far, the execution of the control software associated with virtualization in carrier…

One of the joke statements of the virtual age is “You can’t send a real tech to fix a virtual problem!”  Underneath the joke is a serious question, which is just what happens to test and measurement in a virtual world?  Virtualization opens two issues—how do you test the virtual processes and flows, and how…