We need a fitting way to close our exploration of telecom evolution through “facilitating services”, and the Telecom Ecosystem Group has offered a possible one with their report “An Ecosystem Model: Innovation in the CSP Supply Chain”. While the TEG isn’t strictly a standards body, it is a body I believe to be more rooted…
I’d love to say that security services were the ideal target for telcos’ facilitating services, but as I concluded in my last blog, it doesn’t seem to be in the cards. We can’t evolve to facilitating-service nirvana from a comfortable security starting point. OK, another good way to reach the optimum future is to look…
The best future is one that’s attainable. The most attainable thing is one that builds from the present. The best future that builds from the present builds from the best of the present. In networking, that means security. SDxCentral has a decent piece on a security-first slant to networking we can jump off from. The…
We’re obviously at the “How low can you go?” point in telco capex. We don’t seem to be getting closer to answering the question, either, which has telcos and vendors alike very worried. There are major shifts at work here, created by major forces, and some of those forces are relatively new. The reaction of…
Everyone in any market has to play the game, so to speak. The operative words “play” and “game”, though, have to relate strongly to each other. You can’t run out onto a baseball diamond with a helmet and shoulder pads, expecting to block and tackle. As simple as this lesson may be, there are signs…
It seems like 2024 is already the year of busted myths. One of particular interest is the idea that telcos would cede “carrier cloud” hosting applications for their services, including 5G, to public cloud providers. As a Light Reading story recounts, this just doesn’t seem to be happening. Of 38 operators who offered me comment…
In the last week, I’ve had a lot of comments from both operators and vendors regarding the issue of function hosting. It’s pretty clear that networks are evolving to a state where functionality is distributed between custom devices (like routers), dedicated devices (white boxes), and general-purpose hosts (servers). Some have suggested that we’re heading for…
Well, for everything there is a season, they say. If that’s true, then the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) has passed its own. The body is merging with the Linux foundation after over two decades of independent live, and the Foundation is taking over three of its projects, Broadband, Aether, and P4. Broadband ideals with access…
There are a lot of factors that impact our ability to address technology in business terms. Some relate to the exploding complexity of technology, some to the slower evolution of business goals that technology might serve, some to external forces like regulations and the financial markets…it’s complicated. Right now, though, enterprises are telling me that…
The recent announcement about HPE acquiring Juniper, and my blogs on it, raised a lot of discussion on LinkedIn about the combined company’s likely telco strategy, and as it happened there was also a discussion on an Omdia paper called “Telcos must take charge of their cloud native vision”. This in turn referenced a CNCF…