The fall is an important time for operators, because they have traditionally embarked on a technical planning cycle starting mid-September and running forward to mid-November. This is the stuff that will then be used to justify their budget proposals for the coming year. We’ve now finished that cycle for the 2016 budget, and I’ve been…
All networking reduces to getting connected to your services, which means access. In the past and in a business sense, the “divestiture” and “privatization” trends have first split access from long-haul, then combined it. The Internet has also changed access networking, creating several delivery models inexpensive enough to serve consumers. Today, virtualization is creating its…
Revolutions have their ups and downs. “These are the times that try men’s souls,” said Tom Paine before the American Revolution, and the current times are probably trying the souls of many an SDN or NFV advocate. For several years, we heard nothing except glowing reports of progress in both areas, and now we seem…
I admit that in past blogs I have vented about the state of insight being demonstrated on IoT. It would be far easier to provide a list of dumb things said and offered in the space than a list of smart things. In fact, up to late last week I couldn’t put anything on the…
There are a lot of ways to get to the network of the future, but I think they all share one common concept. Services are in the eye of the beholder, meaning buyer, and so all services should be viewed as abstractions that define the connectivity and SLA they offer but are realized based on…
Cisco’s numbers for the quarter just ended were decent, but their guidance for the current quarter was a disappointment to many. Yeah, Cisco did the usual dance about macro-economics and currency fluctuations, but you can see the Street is concerned that either technology shifts or operator pressure on costs (or both) was impacting Cisco. The…
IoT could well go down in tech history as the most transformational concept of all time. It will certainly go down as the most hyped concept. The question for IoT, in fact, is whether its potential will be destroyed by the overwhelming flood of misinformation and illogic that it’s generated. SDN and NFV have been…
Responding to a LinkedIn comment on one of my recent blogs, I noted that SDN and NFV had to focus now on not falling prey to the ATM problems of the past. It’s worth starting this week by looking objectively at what happened with ATM and how SDN and NFV could avoid that (terrible) fate. …
I was talking yesterday with an old friend from the network operator space, a long-standing member of the NFV elite, and one of our topics was just what could pull through SDN and NFV. Two specific notions came up, one the Internet-of-Things opportunity I mentioned a number of times in my blogs (yesterday, for example)…
If you go to the website of a big vendor who sells a lot to the network operators, or read their press releases, you see something interesting. The issues that these vendors promote seem very pedestrian. We hear about things like “customer experience”, “unified services”, “personalizing usage”, “traffic growth”, “outages”, and even “handset strategies”. Where’s…