Industry and standards bodies in telecom have, in my personal view and from my own experience, a bit of a tarnished history. Even the fifty-odd operators I’ve interacted with in the last month think that the activities of these groups take way too long, and a very large majority say the results aren’t “transformative”. Now,…
Activist investors are always the bane of company management, and AT&T is surely no exception. Elliott Management bought a stake in the company, and that sent AT&T’s stock on a rally. Elliott thinks that AT&T has lowered shareholder value through its aggressive M&A, and management (not surprisingly) disagrees. The question is who’s right and why,…
Sometimes the interplay of news is more newsworthy than the news itself. Last week we had Ciena’s quarterly report and Cisco’s deal for Acacia, and the two certainly create an interesting combination. Add in the now-almost-routine comments that telco profit per bit is declining and that IP is the dialtone of the connected world, and…
Edge computing is another of those topics on the verge (if not over it) of being over-hyped. Part of the reason is that we don’t really have a solid definition or taxonomy for the space, and part because we haven’t really looked at the business case. I’ve been trying for a year to get some…
Network operators are going to both offer cloud computing services and adopt them internally, but the question is “How?” It’s now looking like internal applications for cloud computing are influencing operator cloud planning more than expected. Last week I talked about AT&T, which is about the only provider I can really talk about in specific…
What kind of carrier cloud we finally get, and when we get it, will depend on what drives its deployment. There are a lot of drivers of carrier cloud, and the network operators probably all emphasize them in different ways. It also turns out that there are options for how carrier cloud services are hosted,…
Just what benefits drive or justify cloud adoption? This is a question you’d think had been asked a million times since the dawn of the cloud era, but in surveys and discussions with CIOs, I’m finding that’s not been the case. Companies had largely accepted the widely publicized view of cloud benefits until about 2016,…
One area of 5G and cloud intersection is the 5G User Plane, a component of the 5G Core architecture. My readers know of my skepticism about 5G Core deployment overall, but I’m going to set that aside for a bit to deal with how the 5G User Plane could be considered a poster child for…
There are some interesting things going on with Airship, an AT&T-promoted open-source project to deploy a virtualized hosting layer on top of bare metal. For one thing, it’s getting support from a major server vendor, Dell. For another, it’s closing a loophole in the overall vision of cloud hosting, and it’s addressing some issues that…
Are we in for tech trouble? Cisco’s quarter ended last week, and while their numbers were decent, their guidance disappointed. Enterprise orders fell, and the service provider space continues to be weak. Generally, Cisco has been a bright spot in the network and tech space, so we have to ask whether those spaces are at…