APIs are good and perhaps even great, and “open” APIs are even better. That’s the party line, and it has many elements of truth to it. Look deeper, though, and you can find some truly insidious things about APIs, things that could actually hamper the software-driven transformation of networking. “API” stands for “Application Program Interface”,…
We are still hearing feedback from operators on the importance of “cloud-native” in things like NFV. As an example, Fierce Telecom has run THIS piece on the topic. I’m still concerned that we’re jumping onto a terminological bandwagon thinking it will have a tangible effect on things, and that’s not the case. We need to…
At the recent Linux Foundation Open Networking Summit, operators had a lot to say about open-source, zero-touch automation, and NFV. While it was clear (as Light Reading reported HERE) that operators remain very optimistic about open-source and open-system approaches to network evolution, it’s not all beer and roses. One interesting thing that attendees of the…
There are a lot of axioms in the world, but in networking some of them are more like what we used to call “postulates” in my geometry days. Postulates are statements presumed to be true, and it just might be that some of our cherished views fall more into that category. That’s particularly true with…
How do vendors and network operators solve their NFV problem? In just the last two or three months, it’s become clear that operators are generally of the view that NFV, at least as ETSI has defined it, has limited value. It’s clear that carrier cloud has enormous value, but both vendors and operators are struggling…
Sprint is yet another operator to announce an IoT platform, but we still don’t have a real handle on what a really useful IoT platform would look like. So far, perhaps not surprisingly, what’s coming out focuses on what the operator does in the RAN to support IoT sensors. Is that all there is, or…
The announcement that Affirmed Networks EPC is now available as a hosted AWS service is very interesting in two dimensions. The obvious one is that Amazon itself might be trying to get into the mobile network business, to take advantage of the hosting opportunity that might otherwise drive carrier cloud. The less obvious one is…
On October 1st, Verizon will launch the 5G home network service it promised, in four cities. The pricing for current Verizon wireless customers will be $50 and for others $70. This is a big deal, perhaps less for the fact that it gives 5G-hungry editors something to work with than that it’s a potential step…
Everything in the tech news is not hype, fortunately, and I found a great example of something that’s playing it straight in Fierce Telecom. “Time to move on from NFV; focus instead on the cloud” is perhaps the best picture of telecom reality I’ve seen in years. Quoting Vodafone’s head of virtualization, Fran Heeran, the…
In earlier blogs, I’ve noted that AI is about as overhyped as a concept can be. That wouldn’t make a Cisco announcement in AI surprising; Cisco has always been willing to surf the hype wave. This time could be different, though. Cisco may actually be onto something very smart…emphasis on “may”. To start with the…