We hear all the time that online experiences are growing in importance to consumers and workers. We hear that we’re all integrating our phones and the stuff that’s delivered through them with our everyday lives. We hear that the line between the real world and the virtual world is getting blurred, and that new developments…
Do We Embrace AI, Fear It, Ignore It, or What?
Let’s face it, AI is a bit of a mess. Even among technologists, AI literacy is down in the bearskin-and-stone-knives level. Buyers don’t understand what aspects of AI technology connect to useful business missions, though they still believe that somehow it could be transformational. The space is tied to supergenius technical types, supergreedy VC types,…
What Cisco Says About Network Spending, Versus What Buyers Tell me
When there are articles coming out that say that network vendors are having not only a bad year but a bad decade, you have to believe something just might be wrong. Of course, it is, and most of Wall Street believes that Cisco’s quarter was a pretty solid indicator of the problems that vendors are…
Operators and Vendors See 6G From Different Sides (reposted)
I’ve blogged several times recently about the issues facing network operators, and the remedies that they might be considering. Operators have been telling me about these problems for almost exactly twenty years now, which raises two questions. First, why don’t we hear them raising them more publicly? Second, why hasn’t something been done? We have…
Microsoft’s Radius May Create a Critical Advance for Abstraction and Virtualization, and even NFV (reposted)
If abstraction is the key concept in virtualization, then you might wonder why it’s not been played in the market explicitly. It has, in multiple forms, but not in a way that linked explicitly to the abstraction concept. Now, though, Microsoft has launched Radius, a “cloud-native” application platform that abstracts the stuff it runs on,…
Out With TAM, in With ARPU?
According to the song, “To everything turn, turn, turn, there is a season turn, turn, turn….” That’s surely true for network operator service revenue opportunities, and one thing that all 88 of the operators I talked with this year have made that clear. The biggest problem, according to 57 of the operators is the “challenge…
Network Operator Cost Management: 2024 and Beyond
If you want to raise profit per bit as a network operator, you have to raise revenues, lower costs, or both. For decades, operators enjoyed significant growth in mobile services and even good growth in wireline broadband, which gave them a cushion in terms of profit, but even during that period, profit per bit was…
Looking Inside the Critical Concepts of Virtualization
Everyone believes that virtualization is important. I hear that from all 301 enterprises I’ve chatted with on the topic this year, and all 88 of the network operators. There are really no service providers or enterprises who I think aren’t committed to virtualization, and in multiple ways. It’s also a topic that most buyers (and…
There are Telco Services Enterprises Think Would be Helpful, but Not Always What Telcos Want to Sell
What do enterprises want from their service providers? That’s a question that the service providers are focused on to the point of obsession, and one that’s aroused a lot of speculation among the service planners. What’s interesting is that there doesn’t seem to be much of a correlation between what these planners are speculating on,…
Cloud Native, Telco Cloud, and the Latest Hopes and Gripes
We don’t seem to be able to shake the topic of cloud-native technology in the telco world. It’s also getting merged with what I think is a more general topic, which is “telco cloud”. As I noted in an earlier blog, I’ve been fiddling with the design of a digital-twinning “metaverse-of-things” software model, and it’s…