Author: Tom Nolle

One of the kingpins in Juniper’s financial future, according to the Street at least, is the success of its PTX strategy.  PTX is an optical-core evolution that responds to network operator pressure for some way to build IP cores other than with humungous gigarouters.  We noted at the time that we believed that the PTX…

AT&T surprised nobody and angered everybody (or at least almost everybody) when they announced that they were now imposing metered usage on all unlimited-data plans at specific cap rates per month.  The announcement comes just as the MWC show ends, a show that seemed more interested in promoting new things to do with cheap bandwidth…

Cisco followed up on Chambers’ vague comments about small-cell support with an announcement of its own Hotspot 2.0 WiFi roaming products, particularly a gateway designed to manage small-cell connection into a mobile network.  The move comes as network equipment vendors work hard to address the changes in networking being driven by the increased emphasis on…

MWC kicks off this week, a show working to transition itself to relevance in a market that’s trying to do the same.  The questions are first whether either of the two transitions are possible, and second whether there’s a single direction that accomplishes both. For the show, relevance means embracing social networks, handsets, developer programs,…

HP’s numbers, like those from rival Dell, disappointed the Street, and this raises the question of whether tech capital spending might be showing an impact from the “project” issues I outlined in Netwatcher this month.   Projects that advance IT overall just aren’t being launched as much, so spending is stagnating.  The explanations offered by…

F5 is buying a signal networking player Traffix, who specializes in the DIAMETER protocol used often in mobile IMS networks, a move that signals that the company is going to launch an attack on the backhaul and mobile-service infrastructure space in earnest.  What Traffix provides create what us effectively a signaling overlay network, and we…

Net neutrality has been a thorny issue for the industry from the first, and the importance of finding a rational policy increases as network operators come closer to the point of “ARPU turnaround”, when the revenue-per-user curve flattens and then falls.  Since traffic per user is increasing, this turn-around point spells the time when future…

I’ve been speculating on the role that WiFi might play in the future mobile broadband ecosystem, and Alcatel-Lucent has apparently been doing the same.  The result is their latest enhancement to their lightRadio line, which they call “lightRadio WiFi”, a development that addresses the reality of mobile broadband—it’s not all about 3G and 4G but…

Cisco and Alcatel-Lucent both delivered their quarterly numbers late last week, and in both cases the numbers were decent, but the fortunes of the two companies’ stock was different.  Cisco’s declined after its report, and Alcatel-Lucent climbed significantly.  The question is whether there was a difference in the numbers that justified the different investor reaction,…

Video and streaming are obviously going to be hot topics for a long time, and there’s interesting stuff happening all through the food chain.  The question is whether the ecosystem that’s being pushed in so many directions at so many levels is going to converge on anything that all the players can survive in. CES…