We continue to hear a lot about blockchain technology in networking, including a role for it in service lifecycle automation. Some have suggested it’s a critical technology in the latter, and while I think it could play a very useful role, I think that the value of blockchain there (as is the cases in many…
We are now approaching a new year and a new budgetary cycle for just about everyone. That makes it a good time to look ahead, and I want to start that now by looking at three examples of important future trends. I’ll use a specific company/product to highlight each trend. The first trend is the…
Way back in 2013 I attended a big transformation meeting at a Tier One operator. One of the things that happened that I felt was both interesting and ironic was that the person sitting on my left was making a case for the modernization of OSS/BSS systems as the key to transformation. The person sitting…
IBM is buying Red Hat. A summary view I’ve already expressed to a reporter is that it’s about the only smart move open to IBM, but there’s a big question whether IBM knows why it’s smart and will exploit the deal properly. IBM is literally a legend in IT, having held the position of “most…
Carol Wilson of Light Reading did a nice piece on the operators’ mixed position on open-source, quoting comments from the Light Reading NFV Carrier SDN event. I’ve blogged about some of the points of the discussion, but I wanted to cover those that I hadn’t covered, or perhaps hadn’t covered fully. The fall is the…
There is a lot of 5G that is real. There is a lot that is almost surely a pipe dream, and there’s some in between. Network slicing is one of the latter. The assumption for network slicing is that a 5G network can be divided into separate, parallel, virtual slices that act as independent networks. …
What makes orchestration so hard? Another Light Reading piece on NFV asks whether open-source is the right choice for NFV orchestration. It’s a good question, but only part of the bigger question, which is how we’d define “rightness” to begin with. It’s pretty obvious that there are multiple visions of orchestration, both within the NFV…
The traditional fall technology planning cycle for network operators isn’t over yet, but I’m already hearing a lot of interesting stuff, and also that most of the good stuff has already been discussed. Thus, it’s a good time to take a look at what operators really think about their 2019, and the specific technology areas…
Just how committed are operators to open source? We see a lot of stories about their sweeping shift to open-source technology, but is that shift a real one? I did a quick survey of operators last month, and over three-quarters of them said that their current open-source deployments (beyond things like Linux and other software…
We finally have a vendor coming out to say that maybe WiFi and not 5G is the answer to IoT connectivity requirements. An SDxCentral report says Broadcom isn’t depending on 5G to open up connectivity, but instead points out that when 4G came along, operators had aspirations of replacing WiFi in buildings, only to come…