The headline Bloomberg published on Wednesday was “FCC Chief Sets Up Clash With Call to Repeal Net Neutrality”, certainly one to generate clicks. Most of the TV and online coverage of the current FCC action followed the same path. But is it the right path? You have to do a little history-dipping to decide. The…
One of the 5G features that gets lots of attention is network slicing. Most of the press on the topic has been at least positive if not gushing, but operators have some specific questions about the business case, and more about technology issues. The big question on the technology side is how network slicing might…
We are again seeing stories and comments around “what’s wrong with NFV”. That’s a good thing in that it at least shows awareness that NFV has not met the expectations of most who eagerly supported it four years ago. It’s a bad thing because most of the suggested ills, and therefore the explicit or implied…
Verizon certainly raised a ruckus in the industry with their views on consolidation. The sense of their CEO’s comments was that Verizon was open to a merger that offered them content ownership, and that says a lot about the industry overall. Here we have a giant telco saying that without content ownership their position is…
We are confronted now the need to talk about IBM, not for the first time. The company beat estimates on EPS slightly, with a set of one-time moves that the Street didn’t like much. They missed yet again on revenue, and their shares took a hit (again) as a result. Here is a company who…
There is no shortage of things we inherit from legacy telecom. An increasing number of them are millstones around the neck of transformation, and many of those that are drags are related to management and SLA practices. Those who hanker for the stringent days of TDM SLAs should consider going back in time, but remember…
Transformation, for the network operators, is a long-standing if somewhat vague goal. It means, to most, getting beyond the straight-jacket of revenue dependence on connection services and moving higher on the food chain. Yet, for all the aspirations, the fact is that operators are still looking more at somehow revitalizing connection services than transforming much…
We tend to think of transformation as something that network operators, particularly telcos, have to go through. In point of fact, transformation, meaning technology transformation, is going to happen to everyone, buyers and sellers, operators and enterprises. That truth leaves two questions—what kind of transformation will happen, and how will the players respond to the…
The network of the future might have to evolve from the network of today, but it has to evolve and not take root there. Google has consistently looked first at the future, in network terms in particular, and only then worry about linking the future back to the present. Their latest announced concept, Expresso, has…
One of the questions certain to arise from discussions of service lifecycle management is how VNFs are managed. The pat answer to this is “similar to the way that the physical network functions (PNFs) that the VNFs replace were managed.” Actually, it’s not so pat a response, either. It is very desirable that management practices…