Author: Tom Nolle

If you like the idea of somehow creating a union between CORD and ECOMP then the next obvious question is just where that union has to start.  The answer, in my view, isn’t in a place where both architectures contribute something that could be united, but where neither does enough and external unionizing forces are…

The concept of carrier cloud has taken some hits over the last months.  Media coverage for network functions virtualization (NFV) shows a significant negative shift in the attitude of operators over the progress of NFV.  Verizon sold off the cloud business it purchased, and is now reported to be selling off its cloud computing business. …

Continuing on my recent theme of 5G assessment, I want to look today at the relationship between 5G, SDN, and NFV.  Because 5G evolution is considered a given in the industry, many vendors in the SDN and NFV space have been eager to link their wares to 5G as a means of insuring they’re not…

The announcement that Telefonica has turned to Huawei for its virtual EPC is certainly of major significance.  Huawei is the only major telecom vendor who’s managed to gain significantly in revenue over the last several years, largely due to its price-leader status.  Competitors like Cisco, Ericsson, and Nokia have hoped to wrestle away some market…

Cisco announced it was buying AppDynamics, an application performance monitoring (APM) company, snatching (literally) the company from an IPO that was already oversubscribed.  The price tag, $3.7 billion, raised a lot of eyebrows in the financial community.  Most agree that Cisco (like everyone in the IT space) needs to get more software-centric, but the question…

I blogged recently about the three categories of operators, categories divided by the operators’ thinking on the path to transformation and the role of things like SDN and NFV.  It’s only fair to do the same thing now with the network vendors, who also happen to divide into three categories.  Where the operators divide based…

The future of networking, like the future of practically everything else, is largely dictated by return on investment, meaning the balance of costs and revenues for all the players.  I think 2017 is going to be a pivotal year, in no small part because network operators have predicted this will be the year where their…

Virtual functions and NFV are all about virtualizing network features, right?  Well, perhaps not.  There is increased interest in looking at application components as virtual functions, and this trend might be critical in justifying the carrier cloud, and even in supporting NFV’s narrower goal.  It might not be too much of a stretch for current…

Every network operator I’ve surveyed has some sort of wholesale/retail relationship with other operators.  Most fit into two categories—a relationship that extends geographic scope or one that incorporates one operator’s service inside another (like backhaul or MVNO).  Given this, it is natural to assume that services built on SDN and/or NFV would have to be…