Author: Tom Nolle

The concept of serendipity is dear to everyone.  You find a winning lottery ticket, dig up a pipe and find a stash of buried treasure, and (if you’re a network vendor) do a bunch of stupid stuff that somehow adds up to putting you in the right place at the right time.  Well, it’s nice…

SDxCentral cites an important truth in an article and report (the latter from the MEF and the Rayno Report), which is that there’s a lot of dissatisfaction with OSS/BSS out there.  It’s more complicated than that, though.  I mentioned in a prior blog my own experience at a major Tier One, where I got a…

Most of those who follow topics in SDN and NFV will recognize the ONOS or Open Network Operating System project.  It’s been covered regularly in the media, but much of the coverage seems to present it as a kind of alternative OPNFV.  It’s true that ONOS and OPNFV, as projects, could be considered to have…

I know that in past blogs I’ve noted that we often create unnecessary problems in the industry by overloading hot new technology terms.  “Software-Defined Network” is a great example; some people have used the term to describe a major shift from distributed device-adapted networking to centralized software networking.  Others think you get to SDN by…

Network virtualization is unique in our virtualizing world in that it’s both a goal and a facilitator.  We want to use network virtualization to change both the services networks can offer and the way that familiar services are created, and at the same time we expect virtualization to answer new questions on resource connection and…

Yesterday, Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent combined, and as a company name at least the latter is no more.  The question now is whether the merger will accomplish anything.  Many, myself included, have wondered if the Alcatel-Lucent combination wasn’t one of the classic cases where the whole ended up being a lot less than the sum of…

Sometimes really important things reach the news but in pieces, and that may be the case with two items in SDx Central.  Huawei, says one article, is beefing up its open source credentials with new hires.  Fujitsu, according to a second article, has announced a new SDN controller that uses two levels of abstraction.  It’s…

It seems to me that if you read the tea leaves of current carrier plans you see that the potential for new things like SDN and NFV are being inhibited by “old-think”.  If we try to build a new model of a Carrier Ethernet network, we’re limited in the benefits we can bring relative to…

Standards documents are definitely not entertaining reads, even important ones.  The ETSI ISG published its “Report on SDN Usage in NFV Architectural Framework” prior to the last ISG meeting, and I’ve been reading through it.  There are a lot of interesting and useful things in it, and some things that I think are problematic, but…

It’s the first working day of 2016, and I guess I have a kind of obligation to talk about what to expect the rest of this year on the biggest issue facing telecom—operator return on infrastructure.  We stand a year from the time when operators said that falling revenue per bit and insufficient progress in…