We are now past the traditional fall technology planning cycle for the network operators, and I’ve heard from the ones that cooperate in providing me insight into what they expect to do next year and beyond. There are obviously similarities between their final plans and their preliminary thinking, but they’ve also evolved their positions and…
The ONAP Amsterdam release is out, and while there are reports that the modular structure eases some of the criticisms made of ONAP, I can’t say that it’s done anything to address my own concerns about the basic architecture. I’ve tried to answer them by reviewing the documentation on ONAP, without success. They’re important, basic,…
We have at least the as-yet unvoted draft of the FCC’s new position on Net Neutrality, and as accustomed as I am to reading nonsense about developments in tech, the responses here set a new low. I blogged about the issues that the new FCC Chairman (Pai) seemed to be addressing here, and I won’t…
Cisco reported its quarterly numbers, which were still down in revenue terms, but they forecast the first growth in revenue the company has had in about 2 years of reports. “Forecast” isn’t realization of course, but the big question is whether the gains represent what one story describes as “providing an early sign of success…
We have no shortage of orchestration activity in standards groups, and the MEF has redoubled its own Life Cycle Orchestration (LSO) efforts with its new MEF 3.0 announcement. The overall approach is sound at the technical level, meaning that it addresses things like the issues of “federation” of service elements across provider boundaries, but it…
We are seeing more signs of the fiber challenge and opportunity, and more uncertainty about how it will play out, especially in terms of winners and losers. Ciena continues to take sensible steps, Infinera continues to stumble, and making sense of these seeming contradictions is the challenging part of assessing fiber’s future. It’s not like…
IoT has been contending for the most-hyped technology of our time, and a recent T3C Summit event that cause got a big boost. According to SDxCentral’s summary of a panel at the event, “…it makes sense that in the Internet of Things (IoT) boom, with its expected 20 billion to 50 billion connected devices by…
Suppose we decided that it was time to think outside the virtual CPE box, NFV-wise. The whole of NFV seems to have fixated on the vCPE story, so much so that it’s fair to ask whether there’s anything else for NFV to address, and if so what exactly would the other options look like. vCPE…
How do you know that software or software architectures are doing the wrong thing? Answer: They are doing something that only works in specific cases. That seems to be a problem with NFV software, including the current front-runner framework, ONAP. The initial release, we’re told by Light Reading, will support a limited set of vCPE…
The notion of stateless microservices for networking and the cloud is hardly new. I introduced some of the broad points on state in my blog last week, but the notion is much older. Twitter pioneered the concepts, and Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have all deployed web services to support the model, which is aimed at…