Sometimes really important things reach the news but in pieces, and that may be the case with two items in SDx Central. Huawei, says one article, is beefing up its open source credentials with new hires. Fujitsu, according to a second article, has announced a new SDN controller that uses two levels of abstraction. It’s…
The big question for network operators is less how they might use SDN or NFV but how they might build their next-gen infrastructure to support an evolved business model. That question has been asked for a full decade now, and tellingly it was first called “transformation”. The term reflects a top-down vision that’s absent in…
It seems to me that if you read the tea leaves of current carrier plans you see that the potential for new things like SDN and NFV are being inhibited by “old-think”. If we try to build a new model of a Carrier Ethernet network, we’re limited in the benefits we can bring relative to…
One thing that is probably clear to everyone who reads about SDN or NFV these days is that there is no real consensus on what either actually do, or should do. There’s a lot of confusion out there, inhibiting a strong consensus on what SDN or NFV can do, separately or together, and what other…
Standards documents are definitely not entertaining reads, even important ones. The ETSI ISG published its “Report on SDN Usage in NFV Architectural Framework” prior to the last ISG meeting, and I’ve been reading through it. There are a lot of interesting and useful things in it, and some things that I think are problematic, but…
Since networking is a kind of massive cooperative behavior set, it’s not surprising that the critical networking technology “revolutions” we face have a relationship. What is surprising is that the relationship isn’t all that clear. Software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), and software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) share some technology elements and they may also…
It’s the first working day of 2016, and I guess I have a kind of obligation to talk about what to expect the rest of this year on the biggest issue facing telecom—operator return on infrastructure. We stand a year from the time when operators said that falling revenue per bit and insufficient progress in…
Years ago I was a member of the Data Interchange Standards Association (DISA), involved in electronic data interchange (EDI). This body provided message interface specifications for common business transactions, and because of that you could say it was a very early (and widely successful) example of M2M. I was thinking about EDI yesterday, and I…
In a recent interview Verizon’s CEO talked about a three-tier strategy for the company. You start with the best connectivity, add platforms that can drive traffic, and then add content, applications, and solutions selectively where you need an ecosystem. While the interview was focused on mobile plans, you can see it has potentially broader value…
If there is a network operator who epitomizes the understanding of the real requirements for the next-generation carrier network, it is Telefonica. If there is a vendor who has the product elements needed to make a complete business case for NFV, it’s HPE. Yet we heard on Christmas Eve that Telefonica was terminating HPE’s integration…