Author: Tom Nolle

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…