How personal should a network be? The vast majority of things I could find on the Internet, I never want to see. The vast majority of people who could reach me, or who could reach, are those I never want to talk with. Enterprises tell me that the great majority of the possible user-to-application or…
Author: Tom Nolle
Does Google’s New Personal/Home Assistant Change the OTT Game?
Google opened a lot of interesting topics with its developer conference this week, and I think there’s a common theme here that aligns with other industry moves and foretells something even more important. We are moving closer to the concept of the digital assistant as our window on the world, and that could open a…
Netcracker’s AVP: Is This the Right Approach to SDN and NFV?
I had an opportunity this week to look over some material from Netcracker on their notion of a “digital service provider”, part of the documentation that relates to their Agile Virtualization Platform concept. I also reviewed what was available on the technology and architecture of AVP. I find the technology fascinating and the research and…
Overlay/Underlay Networking and the Future of Services
Overlay networks have been a topic for this blog fairly often recently, but given that more operators (including, recently, Comcast) have come out in favor of them, I think it’s time to look at how overlay technology might impact network investment overall. After all, if overlay networking becomes mainstream, something of that magnitude would have…
Is the New OPNFV Event Streams Project the Start of the Right Management Model?
One of those who comment regularly on my blog brought a news item to my attention. The OPNFV project has a new activity, introduced by AT&T, called “Event Streams” and defined HERE. The purpose of the project is to create a standard format for sending event data from the Service Assurance component of NFV to…
Network Feature Composition, Decomposition, and Microservices
At the TMF event in Nice Verizon opened yet another discussion, or perhaps I should say “reopened” because the topic came up way back in April 2013 and it was just as divisive then. It’s the topic of “microservices” or breaking down virtual functions into very small components. NetCracker also had some things to say…
The Critical Open-Source VNF: How We Could Still Get There
One of the most logical places for operator interest in open-source software to focus is in the area of virtual network functions (VNFs). Most of the popular functions are available in at least one open-source implementation, and operators have been grousing over the license terms for commercial VNFs. It would seem that an open-source model…
For IoT, Forget Network Virtualization and Think “Thing Virtualization!”
How can we best accommodate the notion of virtualization to the application of IoT? That’s a question that more and more operators and vendors are wrestling with, and it’s a good one. The answer might be interesting and disruptive—think less about virtualizing the network and more about virtualizing the “things”, the sensors and controllers. I’m…
How Equipment Vendors Can Counter Cautious Operator Spending
With the exception of Huawei, network equipment vendors are facing tightening spending by operators. The reason, obviously, is that compression in profit-per-bit that I’ve been talking about—the compression that’s led to operator support for “transformation” and their interest in SDN and NFV. Since SDN and NFV have not evolved fast enough and far enough to…
The Implications and Impacts of Verizon’s End-to-End Hierarchical Modeling
It has always been my view that NFV would be better and more efficient if there were a common modeling approach from the top layer of services to the bottom layer of infrastructure. I still feel that way, but I have serious doubts on whether such a happy situation can now arise. The service-centric advance…