One of the most important trends in network equipment is the increased availability of “merchant silicon”, chips designed to implement common network functions such as switching, routing, and route determination. It is this development that has led to the increased interest in “white box” or open-model technology in networks. While there are several vendors who…
Cloud computing has surely been transformational, but it also surely contends with AI as the leader in the tech-hype category. What gives the cloud the edge, perhaps, in this cynical race is the endurance of the hype. Year after year we heard about how everything was moving to the cloud. Now we hear that everything,…
A recent Light Reading story on the topic of the “cloud-native” movement of telcos includes some interesting comments from telcos themselves. One was “It’s a long journey, and we have very important milestones in front of us.” But is it a long journey, what are the critical milestones, who’s responsible for meeting them, and is…
I noted in yesterday’s blog that there were AI missions that could generate telco revenues. I’m not suggesting that these would be telcos selling AI, nor am I suggesting that these services would necessarily even depend on AI. In fact, they might depend on something else. What we know is that they’re almost certainly business…
I took some time from my time off last week to do some modeling on the way AI could impact telcos. There are, according to my model, some verticals that have extraordinary potential to gain from AI adoption. Is telecom one of them? Let’s see what I found, starting first with some foundation points. First,…
Another question that my series of blogs on telecom standards raised with telcos themselves is “Why couldn’t NFV have fixed these problems?” On the surface, the concept of virtualizing network functions, which is what I advocated in THIS blog, would seem to be what NFV aimed to do. So why didn’t it work? The easy…
Mainframes, monoliths, hybrid cloud, AI…all these are terms that we kick around, but one company, IBM, embodies them all in a way that no other does. IBM is also doing pretty darn well these days. In the last 6 months, it’s stock has gone up over 20%, and in the last year over 50%. Is…
What, if anything, can we say about the value of AI to network operators, to telcos in particular? Is it transformational, justified, or simply applicable? Are there any missions that fall clearly into the “gain” category? I’ve dug through almost 200 comments made by operators on the topic, and this is what I’ve found. First,…
Many of you who read my blog know that Andover Intel has a users-only email link and we encourage consumers of technology to comment, ask questions, debate, or whatever with complete confidentiality. My blogs on standards in general and 6G in particular generated emails from 51 of 88 operators who have commented, as users, and…
OK, let’s face facts. The whole of telecom standards is broken, and something radical is needed to fix it. You only have to read the story of 5G, and reflect on past initiatives like frame relay and ATM, or the IPsphere concept, or Network Function Virtualization (NFV) to see how badly the industry is served…