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…
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…