If the future is as “foggy” (yes, I mean in the sense of being edge-distributed, not murky!) as I have suggested, and if networks have to be adapted to the mission of “fog-connection”, then how does this impact metro networking explicitly? In particular, would this new mission create opportunities for the optical vendors, and could…
I blogged yesterday about the economics-driven transformation of networking from the data center out. My point was that as operators drive toward greater profits, they first concentrate on higher-layer content and cloud-hosted services, then concentrate these service assets in the metro areas, near the edge. This creates a kind of metro-virtual-data-center structure that users connect…
What does the data center of the future look like? Or the cloud of the future? Are they related, and if so, how? Google has built data centers and global networks in concert, to the point where arguably the two are faces of the same coin. Amazon and Microsoft have built data centers to be…
Everyone is talking about carrier capex, in some sense or another. If you’re a vendor you know that your buyers have been pinching pennies, and if you’re an operator you know that return on infrastructure is threatening your capital plans. The Street has worried about it too, though more for vendors’ profit impact than for…
Everyone probably knows the old story about trying to identify an elephant behind a curtain. If you grab a leg, you think it’s a tree; grab a trunk and it’s a snake. I’ve been reading the stories on 5G for the week, and it’s hard not to believe that we’re back to groping the elephant…
It is now being widely reported that Cisco is going to undertake a major restructuring. The Street said Cisco would lay off between 12% and 20% of its global workforce, and that it’s related to shifting resources from hardware to software. In their earnings call, Cisco confirmed the latter but said that only about 5,400…
In my blog yesterday, I talked about what operators thought about vCPE and how their views and the demographics of the service market could impact an NFV vision driven by service chaining. I also had a chance to talk with the same operators about the Internet of Things, and I think their views in that…
The big question about any new network technology has always been whether it could raise revenues. Cost reduction is nice, but revenue augmentation is always a lot nicer—if it’s real. With NFV, the focus of the revenue hopes of operators has been virtual CPE (vCPE) that could offer rapid augmentation of basic connection services with…
The transformation of telecommunications and the networks that underlay the industry is coming to grips with what may seem a semantic barrier—what’s the relationship between “open” and “open-source?” This seems to many a frustratingly vague problem to be circling at this critical time; something like the classic arguments about how many angels can dance on…
When is optical networking going to get some respect? That’s certainly a question that optical vendors are asking, and if you think about it, logic would suggest that the area that produces bits should be a major focus when everyone says traffic is exploding. Answering the “When?” question may require understanding why optics isn’t respect-worthy…