Author: Tom Nolle

AT&T’s report on earnings reinforced some structural changes in the industry that Verizon’s report had already suggested.  One basic truth is that mobile services are more profitable and more fertile areas for growth than wireline.  Another is that mobile service gains and ARPU both depend substantially on broadband and smartphones rather than on voice services. …

Earnings season is underway, and I think it’s clear that the results are generally positive and probably more so than expected.  That raises again the possibility that the recovery is proceeding more quickly than economists expected, and another sign that may be true is that the major parties in the US now seem to be…

Cisco took what could be a giant step for itself at CES with its new video ecosystem.  Called Videoscape, it combines in-home tools and software to centralize the mediation and management of video relationships, creating what’s probably the most architected video service layer available to network operators today.  Since Cisco was already doing well in…

The new year is always a time of perceived change, though of course the simple transition between two calendar dates doesn’t drive change itself.  Rather than talk about the coming year in general (which I’ve done in our Annual Technology Forecast issue for Netwatcher in any event), I’ll focus here on the immediate “changes” the…

I had a chance to review the full text of the FCC’s Net Neutrality Order (10-201 if you’re into the FCC’s numbering system) and there were no real surprises in the material versus the commentary that was provided in the public meeting.  I’m still concerned that the FCC hasn’t created a solid legal foundation for…

The FCC’s neutrality vote went as expected, with commentary by various people involved in the process, including the Commissioners.  I found a lot that I agreed with, but I disagreed with at least some of what virtually everyone said.  It’s not a disappointing order, though I’m sure that most will characterize it that way.  The…

We’re starting off what will likely (but you never know these days!) be a quiet week in the markets.  Top of the news is the announcement by Oracle that it will be supporting at least some of its PeopleSoft and JD Edwards applications on Amazon’s EC2.  This seems a reversal for the company, who had…

There are renewed stories that NSN is looking to sell about a third of itself to a private equity consortium.  The stories aren’t indicating at this point how the share would be divided among the buyers, nor where it would come from in terms of Nokia and Siemens.  It’s a classic good news versus bad…

Enterprises are pushing through a set of complex political and project dynamics in 2011 according to our surveys.  The changes and their motivations offer us an interesting view on the cross-currents that really define what enterprises buy and how they buy it.  Thus, they offer a vision of what we could expect in terms of…

The holiday season is always dominated by consumerism, but it should be pretty clear to everyone that networking itself is increasingly dominated by the consumer.  I think that we’re headed very quickly for a time when the consumer essentially funds all public networking, creates the design paradigms and the economic trade-offs.  Along the way, though,…