Author: Tom Nolle

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…

The story that PC sales slipped in 4Q, first raised as a Microsoft comment yesterday, is now being quasi-confirmed by more detailed shipment data released by various Wall Street researchers.  One, citing Gartner, says that y/y growth in PC sales was well below seasonality in the quarter, and the expectation overall is that PC sales…

Surprise, surprise!  The latest data from the European Telecommunications Operators Association shows that costs are up and revenues are down, and the author wonders how long this sort of imbalance can go on without compromising spending.  Maybe it already has; we noted that Acme Packet showed weakness that could be a symptom of a capex…

I’ve got a kind of “tale of two TVs” today, if that’s not too euphonic for you!  The big story at CES may not be tablets after all, but Google TV.  And the biggest IPTV success story may be doubling down on their approach, but shifting to Microsoft’s  Mediaroom. Google has tried TV already, and…

Acme Packets, one of the growth leaders in the network equipment space as far as the Street was concerned, did a surprise pre-announce of a less-than-expected quarter.  Supporters of the company have rallied around the notion that this is somehow just a transient blip.  Yet the company told investors that the shortfall came from a…