Enterprises are uncertain. So are the network operators, and so are the vendors. In fact, if I did a word cloud from the comments I’ve gotten from everyone in December, “uncertain” would surely be among the biggest words. For enterprises, the word isthe biggest, and so we clearly need to understand what’s at the root…
One of the concepts that got hot in 2023 despite not being new is that of a “neutral host”, which is another name for a company or entity that invests in telecom infrastructure (usually access infrastructure like towers and fiber) and then hosts multiple service providers over their facilities. In the past, this practice has…
One of many hype-versus-reality questions we can expect to focus on in 2024 is the private 5G space. As it’s become clear that 5G investment by operators is winding down and that there’s little on the horizon to replace 5G budgets, private 5G has gotten more interesting. The question is whether there’s really a significant…
While the failure of 5G to generate the hoped-for incremental revenue for operators has been largely accepted, as I noted yesterday, there’s another broader tech transformation that may still be balancing between realization and disappointment, the “open network” model of telco infrastructure. TelecomTV ran their Open Telco Infra Summit on this topic, and the story…
Suppose that we did see networks evolve into my theoretically inexhaustible pool of capacity. Suppose access networks could deliver very high volumes, and that latency in the experience and access networks was low. Suppose costs were contained to be little changed from today. What kind of experience future might be created for us? There seem…
Routers, switches, and other appliances are under commoditization pressure, and I’ve noted in past blogs. What about fiber and wireless access? What I’ve called “experience networks” are threatening the core and even the data center, but access is access, and no matter how commoditized experience-network devices are, they still need to blast photons over glass….
There is no love for 5G at this point, at least no realistic love; that much is clear. That doesn’t mean that the investment wasn’t necessary, but it’s not meaningless either. Thus, what we need to do now is extract the real meaning, and attempt to map out what needs to be done. To do…
The Broadcom acquisition of VMware was one of the major M&A events of 2023, and anyone who’s read my blogs knows that I think there is an enormous strategic symbiosis in play there. The question has always been whether Broadcom sees that too, and if they do whether they actually care enough to take the…
AI is one of the few technologies that get ink both in the technical and popular press. One example of the latter is this piece from NBC News. It’s interesting because it captures so many of the contradictions of AI, and that of course makes it a nice topic to use as a framework for…
The news that AT&T was dropping Nokia in favor of Ericsson was enough to move both companies’ stocks in opposite but predictable directions. The news that the decision was based on AT&T’s goal of Open RAN, given Nokia’s initial leadership in that space, was perhaps the major surprise. The question now is just what this…