When ADVA bought Overture Networks, one of the six companies who I believe has a full-spectrum NFV solution that can make a business case, I was critical of the fact that they seemed to be positioning Overture as a limited extension to the carrier Ethernet business. Now they’ve made their positioning clearer with an announcement…
In many of my past blogs I’ve talked about the question of operations transformation, and proposed that it be considered co-equal to network infrastructure transformation. I’ve also noted that most network operators are weighing the question of how to go about operations transformation. Perhaps because of this (or perhaps because operator views are driven by…
If mobile infrastructure is the target of choice for any aspiring new network technology, then we have to ask why that is in order to decide how new technologies would have to address the future. Everyone knows the answer at a high level—video streaming to mobile devices is the driver of mobile change. It’s not…
One of the lessons of the current earnings cycle is that if you’re a network operator you probably see the profitable side of your future in almost purely mobile terms. For the last ten years, mobile revenues have been strong where wireline has been under pressure. Mobile infrastructure has benefitted from investment priority during that…
I got up this morning and looked in the mirror and found that I wasn’t Bill Gates. I checked my bank balance and investments and I wasn’t a billionaire. There was no shiny new Corvette in my garage. Here’s the question. Does this mean that we’ve entered into an era of retail disillusionment, or does…
More and more people are realizing that the challenge for next-generation networking is basically getting enough of it to matter. Whether we’re talking about replacing switches/routers with white boxes or hosted instances, we aren’t going to justify much excitement if we do that for perhaps two or three percent of the operators’ capital spending. There…
Cisco turned in a decent quarter, particularly considering the state of the network equipment market and the growing concern about the global economy. It’s always nice to have good results to tout to investors, and nice in particular when you need to navigate the usually treacherous path toward next-gen technology without trashing your current revenue…
Everyone wants NFV to succeed including both vendors and operators, and surely the media and analyst communities will find themselves under revenue pressure if NFV fails and something else doesn’t emerge to hype up. From the first, one of the most-promoted examples of NFV has been virtual CPE (vCPE), which propose to substitute hosted connection-point…
If there are hidden issues in SDN and NFV then there surely are in the Internet of Things. IoT, after all, is way ahead in the race to over-hype and perhaps the reason is that the outcome everyone would like to see is decidedly unlikely but decidedly newsworthy. Why not sing for the press and…
While there has certainly been a lot of interest in what the next-generation infrastructure of operators might look like, there’s some indication that operators are thinking less about infrastructure these days. Transformation is still their goal, but more and more are setting their sights higher than the network, and this could have a major impact…