I’ve talked a quite bit in 2014 about the operations issues of NFV, but much less about the issues associated with SDN. We’re at the end of the year now, and so I’d like to rectify that in part at least by addressing SDN operationalization now. There are links to NFV, of course, but also…
There are a lot of illusions in life, and thus not surprisingly in networking. One of the illusions is that there is great opportunity to be had by generating on-demand high-capacity services. Another, possibly related to the first, is that there’s a high value to vertically integrating the operation of networks from the service layer…
We’ve now looked at all of the classes of players who might be transformative influences on the road to NGN. I hope that the exploration brought out some critical points, but in case they didn’t this is a good time to sum them up. We’re heading into 2015, the year that just might be the…
You generally find revolutionaries in coffee shops, not gourmet dining rooms or private clubs. In the race for the right to shape the network of the future, the equivalent of a coffee shop is “second-tier” status. You can see the candy through the window (to mix a metaphor) but can’t quite get at it—unless you…
“The times they are a’changing”, as the song goes. The pace and direction of the changes could be influenced by vendors agile and determined enough to get out there and take some bold steps. We’ve looked at the IT giants who have the most to gain from a transition to a software-server vision of networking. …
Next year is going to be pivotal in telecom, because it’s almost surely going to set the stage for the first real evolution of network infrastructure we’ve had since IP convergence twenty years ago. We’re moving to the “next-generation network” everyone has talked about, but with two differences. First, this is for real, not just…
Over the past several months, I’ve talked about the evolution in networking (some say “revolution” but industries with 10-year capital cycles don’t have those). Along the way I’ve mentioned vendors who are favored or disadvantaged for various reasons, and opened issues that could help or hurt various players. Now, I propose to use the last…
One of the questions being asked by both network operators and larger enterprises is how SDN can play a role in their future WAN. In some sense, though it’s an obvious question, it’s the wrong one. The broad issue is how virtualization can play; SDN is one option within that larger question. If you look…
Since I’ve blogged recently about the progress (or lack of it!) from proof-of-concept to field trials for SDN and NFV, I’ve gotten some emails from you on just what a “field trial” is about. I took a look at operator project practices in 2013 as a part of my survey, and there was some interesting…
Since I blogged recently on the challenges operators faced in making a business case for NFV, I’ve gotten quite a few emails from operators themselves. None disagreed with my major point—the current trial and PoC activity aren’t building a business case for deployment—but they did offer some additional color, some positive and some negative, on…