Author: Tom Nolle

We seem to be in the heart of a true avalanche of industry events, and that always creates a parallel avalanche of news.  There’s always the question of whether a given news item is actually relevant, of course, and I thought it might be helpful to look at optical networking before the action gets underway. …

I promised some of my blog readers that I’d do a deeper dive into the current state of NFV implementations.  One of the challenges that poses is defining just what an NFV implementation is, because NFV means different things to different people and because there’s an ungodly amount of NFV hype out there.  Another challenge…

SDN is the senior partner in the reformation of the network, and this week’s ONF event makes it certain that SDN will be getting more attention.  There’s no question that operators are working hard on applying SDN to address their problems and opportunities, but it should be clear to everyone that SDN is also a…

Most of you probably aren’t old enough to remember the song “Three Little Words” and I won’t bore anyone who’s not interested enough in the source of my blog topic by recounting the lyrics.  They don’t apply in any sense to my topic today, other than that I’m proposing three different three-word triads and weaving…

The announcement that Comcast wants to buy TWC isn’t a surprise to those in the industry, but it’s still raising a lot of hackles because of fears that it would create a giant who would stomp on other competitors and on consumer rights.  The fact that Comcast has been a regular sparring partner with public…

I’ve been talking all this week about the evolution of NFV as a concept, leading up to the ISG meeting in Malaga next week.  One topic that’s been covered is the slippery distinction between “cloud hosting”,“NFV hosting”, or just plain hosting, of something.  Some of the ISG use cases, such as IMS, EPC, and even…

I wrote on Friday about the demand-side evolution of network function virtualization and the importance of framing an NFV story within a broader revamping of service management and operations.  Today we have two more NFV-related data points that again demonstrate that moving to a software-driven vision of network features is complicated—and likely to be competitive….

Analysts all have something in common, which is prognostication.  One of my missions is to predict, to analyze, and there are a lot of people out there who think this sort of thing borders on just “making things up”.  Personally, I welcome a chance to look at real objective data and see how it compares…

The FCC has issued its order regarding the “experimentation” with the evolution of the public network—both from TDM to IP and from wireline to wireless.  The details of the process are no surprise.  The FCC wants to understand how a modernization trend would impact the four “core values” of public safety, universal service, competition, and…

The term “-washing” is applied all too often in our industry, where the dash is preceded by the name of some hot technology like “cloud”, “SDN”, or “NFV”.  Everyone loves publicity and if you can get it by simply tattooing the name of some hot concept on your forehead, so much the better.  Of course,…