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…
One of the positive signs emerging from the ETSI NFV ISG is recent interest in multiple orchestration layers. The notion of a “split orchestration” model that separates traditional NFV Management and Orchestration (MANO) from “resource orchestration” could be a powerful enhancement to the basic NFV mode, and perhaps even a step toward embracing a full…
How can it happen? You hear today that a power failure in Delta Airlines’ Atlanta hub put their systems down for an extended period of time. Obviously all of the Delta problems weren’t ongoing IT problems; once you mess up a ballet like airline flight and crew scheduling it’s hard to get everyone dancing in…
In a number of my past blogs, I’ve talked about the value of an event-driven model for cloud and NFV deployment. Since then I’ve gotten a few requests to explain just what the difference is between traditional and event-based models. It’s a challenge to do that without dipping deeply into programming details, but I’m going…
Despite all the hype around Google Fiber, the fact is that getting fiber to the premises (FTTP) is a major economic challenge. While everyone wants fast Internet, nobody really wants to pay for it, and with the Internet (unlike, say, the auto industry) there’s a deep-seated public perception that somehow what they want should be…
Sometimes it’s useful to take an extreme case, a kind of end-game view, to gain insight into how a technology shift might be happening and what it might mean to the rest of the tech world. I’ve said several times in this blog that the cloud, to be truly revolutionary, had to be more than…
Yesterday, I suggested that the tech giant of the future had to be built around a virtual networking portfolio. I was aiming the comments at “tech giant” companies and specifically at how the companies should reorder their assets to match the needs of the cloud era. I’d like to dig a bit deeper into that…
I noted in an earlier blog that some of the tech giants seemed to be shedding parts of their businesses, parts that would at one time have been considered strongly symbiotic or even critical. Credit Suisse has just suggested that HPE would be worth more to shareholders if it broke itself up and sold off…