If there is a profit-per-bit problem, how much of it could SD-WAN solve? How much could SDN or NFV solve? What are the fundamental attributes of a strategy to address profit-per-bit, and where can we expect to see features to fulfill the potential? These are all critical questions at a time when operators are struggling…
IoT isn’t about 5G, it’s about events and edge computing. A recent story on Rigado’s “edge-as-a-service” is a more realistic take on what IoT means, but is it a full-on example of a winning IoT approach? I have to confess that another “as-a-service” positioning raises my hackles, but we’ll have to look at it, and…
Cisco is always a bellwether for the router market, so when their earnings call gives the Street angst, it’s not just about Cisco. Cisco said that every sector in its product space grew in the last quarter, except the most important one, which was service provider routing. Softness there obviously impacts Cisco’s forecast, whose weakness…
Can we get some definitions here? I’m as interested in software-directed operations processes as the next person (maybe more than most), but I confess that I’m getting buried in terms and concepts that clearly relate to the software-directed operations goal at the high level, but don’t seem to relate well, or consistently, with each other. …
What’s the difference between a use case and a business case? The answer might involve some subtle thinking, but it might also be a key to understanding what’s going on in the 5G space here in the US, and even in global markets. It’s a question that’s plagued our industry for three decades now, at…
Competition among vendors always generates interesting changes, and we may be seeing some more interesting than usual with the announcements of Red Hat and VMware/Dell over the last week or so. Not only is there the usual tension among competitive products, but this time some tension between a vendor who offers open-source software platforms and…
I don’t think NFV will ever be what its proponents hope it will be, but I do think it can be better. Here’s the big question that the Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) initiative has to answer. This is a cloud project, so why not simply adopt cloud technology? That didn’t happen, so we have to…
Is there a new model for telco transformation? According to a Fierce Telecom piece, there may be, and the details in the article match very well with what I’ve been reporting from my own contacts with network operators. The big question may be where this new model will take us, and what vendors, bodies, and…
Virtualization has been around for a long time, and sometimes the pace of its advance has seemed dizzying. The truth is that it’s probably just getting started, and so it’s important to look a little at where we came from and what’s new, to try to get a hint of what’s going to be even…
We’ve all heard the talk about automation and opex reduction as means of improving both service and revenue per bit. Part of the implicit goals in increasing operational efficiency is a shifting of some tasks to an automated form, but a bigger part has to come from shifting customer care responsibility more directly and efficiently…