Author: Tom Nolle

Experience teaches a hard school so they say, but difficulty aside, experience often teaches the only lessons that matter.  We’re starting to get some experience in the NFV space.  It’s not so much direct deployment experience, because little has really happened to drive the kind of NFV deployment that would serve as the model for…

One of the terms you hear more and more in networking is model.  We’ve already had a host of MWC announcements that include it (one of them I’ll blog about specifically tomorrow), and the concept of a model is pivotal in NFV and many cloud management systems.  If you read network rags, then you know…

In many of my past blogs I’ve talked about the question of operations transformation, and proposed that it be considered co-equal to network infrastructure transformation.  I’ve also noted that most network operators are weighing the question of how to go about operations transformation.  Perhaps because of this (or perhaps because operator views are driven by…

One of the lessons of the current earnings cycle is that if you’re a network operator you probably see the profitable side of your future in almost purely mobile terms.  For the last ten years, mobile revenues have been strong where wireline has been under pressure.  Mobile infrastructure has benefitted from investment priority during that…

More and more people are realizing that the challenge for next-generation networking is basically getting enough of it to matter.  Whether we’re talking about replacing switches/routers with white boxes or hosted instances, we aren’t going to justify much excitement if we do that for perhaps two or three percent of the operators’ capital spending.  There…

Everyone wants NFV to succeed including both vendors and operators, and surely the media and analyst communities will find themselves under revenue pressure if NFV fails and something else doesn’t emerge to hype up.  From the first, one of the most-promoted examples of NFV has been virtual CPE (vCPE), which propose to substitute hosted connection-point…

While there has certainly been a lot of interest in what the next-generation infrastructure of operators might look like, there’s some indication that operators are thinking less about infrastructure these days.  Transformation is still their goal, but more and more are setting their sights higher than the network, and this could have a major impact…

When I did a survey of operator priorities back in 2013, the top of the list was mobile broadband (88% of operators listed it) and second with 86% was cloud computing.  At the end of 2015, mobile broadband’s score was almost identical but cloud computing had fallen astonishingly—to only 71%.  Nothing in the history of…

What exactly might a next-generation network look like?  If we actually try to answer that question it becomes clear that there are two parallel visions to contend with.  On the physical side, we have to build the network with fiber transport and something electrical above it, whether it’s a set of special-function devices or hosted…

The number one issue with making an NFV business case is that of service automation.  Any talk about “operations efficiency” or “service agility” that doesn’t start with the assumption that service activity is automated is just a waste of breath.  In addition, if we don’t have very precise notions of how we’d manage the incremental…