Author: Tom Nolle

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,…

This is another one of those days when you have a bunch of news items that reflect a common theme.  What do Yahoo, OpenCompute, and AT&T have in common?  They’re all about the business of networking. Yahoo reported another quarter of disappointment, which frankly should never have been a surprise given that there was nothing…

In October of 2012, an insightful group of network operators published the “Call for Action” that launched Network Functions Virtualization (NFV).  I responded to that call with some suggestions, among which was a recommendation that a prototype be developed as soon as possible.  Operators encouraged me to do that, and a project group came together…

We had a lot of news yesterday, news that I’m going to assert all adds up to cloud-driven change.  To open this blog (since I’m a networking guy after all) I want to start with Juniper.  The company had a decent quarter and while it’s guidance was cautious, the initial reaction of the market to…

One of the imponderables about the future of networking is how it’s going to be paid for.  Nobody is going to invest in a network without ample return, which in financial terms means an ROI that’s at least equal to the investor’s current internal rate of return.  There’s a lot of pressure to “boost benefits”…