Nokia’s quarterly numbers were, to say the least, disappointing, and while telecom equipment is generally a challenge these days (Juniper had its own problem with its quarterly results), Nokia seems to be more challenged than most. The reasons that’s the should be an indicator for others in the telecom equipment space, and also perhaps for…
With what seems to be an explosion of content provider acquisitions underway, Verizon remains committed to being a content delivery partner not a content competitor. With streaming video seeming to be everyone’s direction, Verizon still doesn’t have its own streaming offering. What makes Verizon think they can buck these trends when competitor AT&T has gone…
TV viewers and network professionals alike love the idea of faceoffs. What would happen if a hippo fought an alligator, a lion fought a leopard? Hot stuff. On the network side, we’ve already had “Who wins, Ethernet or IP (or maybe ATM)?” and now perhaps we’re looking at the ultimate tech faceoff, which is “Open-Source…
One of the questions raised by the onrush of interest in SD-WAN is where SDN is. Obviously, two things whose acronyms start with “software-defined” should be related in some way, and I’ve noted in other blogs that SD-WAN and SDN may converge in the longer term. What are the differences today, and where are we…
You might wonder why, if logical networking is such a great idea as I’ve suggested it is, SD-WAN vendors haven’t been flocking to it. They still aren’t, but there’s at least movement in that direction. Cato Networks has announced an “identity-aware routing” feature for its SD-WAN product, and I think it demonstrates that logical networking…
The battle for public cloud supremacy is far from over, but it may be taking a new direction. Amazon has announced its Snowball edge appliance, which some characterize as an extension of the early Greengrass technology that let users run AWS elements on premises, meaning at the edge. This comes as Microsoft is expected to…
The story that Amazon is looking to get into the white box switch business is probably true at some level. Perhaps they really want to sell them, or perhaps they’re simply looking to design their own hardware for their cloud data centers. In either case, it should indeed make the network vendors who rely on…
We looked at clouds from both sides, so the song says, and we probably need to do that with “logical networking” too. From the bottom, SD-WAN is a simple way of extending VPNs, but from the top it’s different. I’ve said in many past blogs that SD-WAN was the on-ramp to a new logical networking…
Suppose that we were able to find a role for standards in a software-defined world. What would that role be? I think it’s obvious that traditional standards processes are simply not effective in the current age. They take way too long and they end up defining an architecture that has to be ignored if the…
Everyone probably agrees that broadband Internet is the revolution of our time. Whether we’re talking about wireline or wireless, even business versus consumer, the explosive growth of broadband access to the Internet has transformed much of telecom. What we used to think of as the prime services (voice calling) is now an afterthought OTT service. …