There has recently been a lot of media attention focused on the cable providers, not only because they’ve been emerging as players in some next-gen technologies like SDN, NFV, and the cloud, but because they’ve been gaining market share on the telcos after losing it for years. All of this seems tied to trends in…
The Ciena announcement of what they call Liquid Spectrum has raised again the prospect of a holistic vision of network capacity management and connectivity management that redefines traditional OSI-modeled protocol layers. It also opens the door for a seismic shift in capex from Layers 2 and 3 downward toward the optical layer. It could jump-start…
The more things change, the more they stay the same, as the saying goes. That certainly seems to be true with NFV, based on what I’ve heard over the last couple weeks from both vendors and network operators. Two years ago, I noted that vendor salespeople were frustrated by the unwillingness of their buyers to…
Today I want to take up the remaining issue with edge-centric and functional programming for event processing, both for IoT and NFV. That issue is control of distributed state and stateless processes. Barring changes in the landscape, this will be the last of my series of blogs on this topic. As always, we need to…
I write a lot about things that aren’t mentioned often elsewhere, and that might rightfully make you wonder whether I’m just off in the lunatic fringe. I did a series of blogs talking about the shift in software in general, and the cloud in particular, to “functional” or “Lambda” programming, and a few of you…
Most of you will recall that there has been a persistent goal to make OSS/BSS “event-driven”. Suppose we were to accept that was the right approach. Could we then apply some of the edge-computing and IoT principles of software structure and organization of work to the OSS/BSS? Let’s take a look at what would happen…
I mentioned in my blog yesterday that a network and addressing model was critical to edge computing and NFV. If that’s true, then could it also be true that having a virtual-network model was critical to vendor success in the NFV space? The VMware NFV 2.0 announcement may give us an opportunity to test that,…
It seems possible, based on the results of the MWC show, to speculate a bit on what infrastructure and service considerations are likely to arise out of the 5G specs. “Speculate” is the key word here; I’ve already noted that the show didn’t address the key realities of 5G, IoT, or much anything else. I…
If computing in general and carrier cloud in particular is going to become more edge-focused over time, then it’s time to ask just what infrastructure features will be favored by the move. Even today we see variations in server architecture and the balance of compute and I/O support needed. It is very likely that there…
The iconic MWC conference is now pretty much history. The big announcements have been made, the attendees have largely exhausted themselves (the exhibitors certainly have!), and it’s time to take stock and decide whether anything important was really said and shown. In terms of point announcements, it’s rare for something huge to come out at…