Author: Tom Nolle

Many of you know that we’ve done surveys of enterprises for thirty years now, and surveys of network operators for more than twenty.  In that time, we’ve seen a disturbing trend, a loss of strategic information readily available to early-stage planners to guide them in adopting new technology paradigms.  They used to get this from…

The mobile phenomena, our gadget-coupled love affair with ubiquitous broadband, is hitting the market in a variety of ways, some expected and some a bit strange.  There are likely stranger ones on tap, too, which is what you’d expect of a revolution.  And for sure, the big revolution of the decade is mobile broadband. One…

Telefonica today announced a research-network trial of a basic IP/DWDM technology combination that flattens networks to an agile IP/MPLS edge and an agile optical core built around GMPLS.  The project included Universal Edge routers from Juniper and Adva Optical DWDM core technology.  Everyone is happy about the resulting reduction in capex and opex, and in…

With Apple looking like it’s going to launch a 7-inch tablet, it’s hard not to see that form factor gaining a lot more traction.  My surveys tell me that enterprises prefer that layout for many of their mobile-worker applications because it’s easier to carry and because most of these apps involve displaying something for on-site…

The telcos, including some big national carriers, have announced their backing of Mozilla’s Firefox OS, a smartphone platform that’s supposed to bring down the price of smartphones.  That’s obviously what’s behind the deal in the first place; telcos have become weary of subsidizing handsets to promote coolness.  They’ve encouraged Microsoft and now it appears that…

Google announced its tablet and some other things besides, and the question now is whether there’s some grand strategy at work here or just a bunch of geeks throwing products at a marketplace.  I think there’s some thinking here, but whether it’s sound thinking remains to be seen. The Nexus 7 tablet is pretty much…

The challenges with coming to terms with technical concepts in our Age of Hype is embodied in a story about SDN that appears in Network World.  The story lists five drivers of SDN transition, which include mobility, the cloud, consumerization of IT, traffic patterns in data centers, and agile service delivery.  The challenge is that…

Tablets, say the research, are becoming a more favored platform for video viewing, with one in ten tablet users viewing content at least daily.  The key point in the data may not be the frequency, which likely surprises no one, but the demography.  The largest tablet penetration is in the key 25-35 year-olds, the swing…

Microsoft’s new tablet, the  “Surface” was announced with much fanfare, but the product has been getting mixed reviews in no small part because it’s really not possible to review it at all.  You can’t get one, even to play with, so far.  No pun intended, but on the surface the device appears well-made and it…

It’s one of those days of a buffet of items that missed the cut during the week.  There’s a theme though, which is the evolution of broadband and Internet. Microsoft announced it’s going to buy Yammer, a company who specializes in creating a kind of social workplace, a collaborative framework based not on evolved voice…