The concept of carrier cloud has taken some hits over the last months. Media coverage for network functions virtualization (NFV) shows a significant negative shift in the attitude of operators over the progress of NFV. Verizon sold off the cloud business it purchased, and is now reported to be selling off its cloud computing business. …
I said in a number of blogs last week that 5G wasn’t an automatic savior for SDN and NFV. It’s not that neither concept could support 5G, or even that 5G wouldn’t be better if SDN and NFV were incorporated. There are instead two critical truths to deal with. First, there isn’t anything currently in…
Continuing on my recent theme of 5G assessment, I want to look today at the relationship between 5G, SDN, and NFV. Because 5G evolution is considered a given in the industry, many vendors in the SDN and NFV space have been eager to link their wares to 5G as a means of insuring they’re not…
We have all heard about 5G at this point, mostly through the heady “you’ll-love-it” pieces that have been done. Not surprisingly, most of these tout features that are either never going to happen (some of the speed claims are for point-to-point millimeter-wave applications only, not for mobile users) or are still in a state of…
The announcement that Telefonica has turned to Huawei for its virtual EPC is certainly of major significance. Huawei is the only major telecom vendor who’s managed to gain significantly in revenue over the last several years, largely due to its price-leader status. Competitors like Cisco, Ericsson, and Nokia have hoped to wrestle away some market…
The announcement that Telefonica has turned to Huawei for its virtual EPC is certainly of major significance. Huawei is the only major telecom vendor who’s managed to gain significantly in revenue over the last several years, largely due to its price-leader status. Competitors like Cisco, Ericsson, and Nokia have hoped to wrestle away some market…
Cisco announced it was buying AppDynamics, an application performance monitoring (APM) company, snatching (literally) the company from an IPO that was already oversubscribed. The price tag, $3.7 billion, raised a lot of eyebrows in the financial community. Most agree that Cisco (like everyone in the IT space) needs to get more software-centric, but the question…
I did a blog earlier about the impact of smartphones on the mobile opportunity and also the way the devices have changed our culture, particularly for the young. Nielson has released some interesting data on video behavior that relates to smartphone and online video use, and I want to recap what the report shows. There’s…
I blogged recently about the three categories of operators, categories divided by the operators’ thinking on the path to transformation and the role of things like SDN and NFV. It’s only fair to do the same thing now with the network vendors, who also happen to divide into three categories. Where the operators divide based…
I remember (with little enthusiasm, frankly) my high-school Latin experience. One fact I can still draw from those days is that “All Gaul is divided into three parts.” Well, so are all operators. Regulations, markets, technology and vendor commitments, and management and business goals all tend to make each operator an entity unto itself, but…