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…
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…