If networking turns to an open model, with open-source software and white-box hardware, can today’s network vendors survive? Sure, but not in the manner to which they’ve become accustomed. If you’re a big predator in a shrinking habitat, you can shrink to match the food supply (evolutionarily speaking, of course), you can learn to eat…
If NFV has a problem, then VMware thinks (or hopes) it has the solution. The company just announced a technology preview called “Project Maestro”, aimed squarely at breaking an NFV logjam that’s caused in part by the problems with integration and onboarding. This could be really big, or really dumb, and frankly I’m having some…
Maybe we should say that everything old was renamed again, or perhaps that all the old names were given to new things. Scott Raynovich’s piece in Fierce Telecom makes that point; SDN and NFV won’t die but just rise as different (perhaps totally different) concepts under the same name. He also says SD-WAN is the…
The fall technology planning cycle for operators is now ending, and the input I’m getting on the results is surely interesting and possibly dire. One thing is very clear; “transformation” hasn’t progressed much, and so operators overall are curtailing capital spending. Equipment vendors are going to have to face up to a basic truth, which…
Could we be missing a big requirement in zero touch? In a recent conversation I had with a Tier Two operations executive, this question came up, and I think it’s a fair one. It also illustrates that the world of telcos is more varied than we’d think. Nearly all the emphasis on zero-touch service lifecycle…
Should we break up big tech? That’s a question that’s being asked both politically and by tech companies themselves. A thoughtful article on the topic raises some good points, but I think there are both useful amplifications of those points the article makes, and some points that it doesn’t make that need to be considered….
“Standards are great they break the ice, dabbling this way is oh so nice…” these paraphrased words from an old song could be an anthem of IoT. The problem is that breaking ice and dabbling don’t get things installed. Indeed, the first step in that is actually having something to install. Amazon, one of the…
I want to pick up on yesterday’s blog about the “new network”, to illustrate how a network operator is responding to the pressures of profit per bit on conventional connection/access services. Remember that operators have been facing declining profit per bit for over a decade, and this pressure is the force behind declining budgets for…
We don’t build networks like we used to. That fundamental fact should illustrate why it’s important to look at how we should build them, given the changes in both technology and demand that have driven networking in a different direction than it followed in even the recent path. The “right” answer to any network question…
Is virtualization a cost-saving strategy? An article in Light Reading on Monday talks about whether a single-vendor virtual network is more likely to save money than a multi-vendor network (Huawei is a major source for the data). That’s a reasonable question, perhaps, but I don’t think it’s the central question here. That honor goes to…