In a recent interview Verizon’s CEO talked about a three-tier strategy for the company. You start with the best connectivity, add platforms that can drive traffic, and then add content, applications, and solutions selectively where you need an ecosystem. While the interview was focused on mobile plans, you can see it has potentially broader value…
Author: Tom Nolle
Summary of an Open NFV Model…From the Top
In my recent group of blogs I’ve covered the main issues with openness in NFV. What I’d like to do in closing this series is describe what could be an effective and open NFV model. There are probably a lot of ways to skin the NFV cat, but this one has been proven out in…
What an NFV Resource Pool Has to Look Like
Network functions virtualization (NFV) is supposed to be about running network service features on commodity servers using “virtualization”. While the vCPE edge-hosting movement has demonstrated that there’s significant value in running virtual functions in other ways, virtualization and the cloud is still the “official” focus of the ETSI work, and what most think will be…
What’s the Best Path to Telco Open-Source Success?
Somebody asked me yesterday what I thought was the pathway to open-source success in the telco space. I got involved in open-source and telco applications thereof back in about 2008, working within the TMF and the IPsphere Forum. In both these bodies I was for a time the only non-telco representative in the group, and…
Optimizing the Cloud Opportunity in 2016
The cloud is surely a popular topic with the media and also with enterprises, but despite the agreement of these two groups that the cloud is interesting, they don’t agree much on what exactly is happening with the cloud. Perhaps even more significant is the fact that they don’t agree about the future of the…
Top Network Issues for 2016: My Personal View
We’re closing in on 2016 and what will surely be a pivotal year in terms of network operator strategy. I’ve already blogged about the results of the operators’ fall planning cycle, and I think that offers a pretty clear view of their technology plans. Because even the best of plans can be contaminated by internal…
What Can We Learn from the Light Reading NFV Tests?
Light Reading has published the first of what they promise will be a series of NFV tests, run in combination with EANTC, and the results are summarized HERE. I think there are some useful insights in the results, but I also think that there are fundamental limitations in the approach. I’m not going to berate…
APIs for NFV Operation: A High-Level Vision
There are a lot of technical questions raised by NFV and even the cloud, questions that we cannot yet answer and that are not even widely recognized. One of the most obvious is how the component elements are stitched together. In NFV, it’s called “service chaining”. Traditionally you’d link devices using communications services, but how…
What’s Ahead for NFV in 2016?
The fall is an important time for operators, because they have traditionally embarked on a technical planning cycle starting mid-September and running forward to mid-November. This is the stuff that will then be used to justify their budget proposals for the coming year. We’ve now finished that cycle for the 2016 budget, and I’ve been…
SDN/NFV: We Don’t Need Everything We Think, but We DO Need Some Things We’re Not Thinking Of
Revolutions have their ups and downs. “These are the times that try men’s souls,” said Tom Paine before the American Revolution, and the current times are probably trying the souls of many an SDN or NFV advocate. For several years, we heard nothing except glowing reports of progress in both areas, and now we seem…