Author: Tom Nolle

You have to love a market that, when faced with seemingly insurmountable contradictions in business and technology trends, proceeds to generate new ones unapologetically.  We had that yesterday with the story that Sprint was considering shutting down the WIMAX assets of Clearwire, then another story that Google might be aiming to be an MVNO.  So…

When I did my review of the Street’s view of consolidation in the service provider space, some of you wondered about the network equipment vendors.  After all, it’s hard to imagine how a buyer industry so pressed for profits it has to collapse into itself via consolidation could avoid putting some price pressure on its…

One of the inevitable results of commoditization is consolidation, and Wall Street (Oppenheimer in particular) has started predicting who among the “providers” in telecom might be acquired by somebody else.  It’s worth looking at their list of eaters and “eatees” to see what we can learn about industry direction. Top of everyone’s list is T-Mobile,…

There have been a number of commitments by network operators to new technologies like the cloud, SDN, and NFV.  Last week, Metaswitch earned its carrier stripes with a win in Europe, one of the first (of many, I’m sure) non-traditional IMS deployments.  Their stuff has been used in at least one NFV PoC. Verizon and…

Everyone knows that operators and enterprises want more service automation.  Some classes of business users say that fixing mistakes accounts for half their total network and IT TCO, in fact.  Nobody doubts that you need something to do the automating, meaning that software tools are going to have to take control of lifecycle management.  A…

Cisco did their expected cloud announcement yesterday, but it wasn’t exactly a complete picture of Cisco’s cloud intentions.  It was at least a better picture of what Cisco is doing than the media has been able to muster, though.  For example, it’s pretty obvious that their investment of a billion dollars in “the cloud” isn’t…

I guess it wasn’t hard to figure out what my blog today would be about.  Netflix’s CEO has blogged and made some strong comments about the need for a very broad interpretation of “net neutrality”.  Netflix in fact wants something even more “neutral” than the FCC order that was overturned on appeal would have provided. …

In a previous blog, I talked about two models of “SDN federation”, one that was at the service level and one that was at the “SDN” or controller level.  One obvious difference between the two is that the former requires some specific service, whose interworking features then drive the federation process.  If you wanted to…

We’ve gone through a whole series of industry events that swirl around the notion of the next-gen network.  I’ve blogged a bit about the TMF, NFV, SDN, and fiber conferences, and as people comment on the LinkedIn posts relating to the blogs it’s interesting how often the discussions end up on the topic of “operationalization”. …

I made a comment in an earlier blog about “orchestration” in the context of service chaining, and a few people messaged me saying they thought the whole orchestration topic was confusing.  They’re right, and since it’s very important for a wide range of things in tech these days this is a good time to try…