If I had to pick a single thing that I believed would bring about the greatest changes in networking for 2024, I’d pick the transformation of broadband access infrastructure. It’s not so much that what’s going to happen will transform the average residential broadband experience, but that it will evolve the experience beyond its traditional…
As those who read my blog know, most network operators and many enterprises undertake a more-or-less-formal technology planning cycle between mid-September and mid-November. One of the areas where both enterprises and network operators are focusing attention is on network operations, or more broadly on IT operations. I’ve followed these sessions for over two decades, and…
Both Cisco and Juniper issued cautious guidance this quarter, which caused both stocks to take a hit. The issue, of course, is that “macro” conditions are said to be challenging, and that means essentially that buyers are slowing their orders, pushing back projects, not doing as much with network equipment as the vendors hoped, or…
It seems like we can never get past the question of the Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) ISG and the value and meaning of its approach to feature/function hosting. For those who’ve read my blogs regularly, you may find this repetitive, but not everyone has and there’s been some LinkedIn comments that suggest that some who…
There’s been a lot of telco interest in “cloud-native” architectures for features and functions. The NFV ISG redid (to an extent) its model to accommodate that goal (see this excellent summary), and it’s also a goal of the Nephio project that targets the use of Kubernetes to deploy telco service elements. The problem is that…
I blogged at the end of last year that the question about Oracle’s cloud service wasn’t whether it was hot, but why it was hot. I provided some answers then, and I want to point out another initiative that also demonstrates that Oracle is determined not to be just another cloud vendor. In fact, they…
If you go back a decade or more, you’d find that television was the killer app for residential services and the cable companies, with their low cost to pass a prospective customer base, was in the driver’s seat. Well, things are changing. Linear TV, the RF stuff the cable company infrastructure was designed to deliver,…
Why does it seem that every market opportunity, technical trend, adoption rate, ends up graphing as a hockey stick? I’m sure you’ve been hearing stories about the 5G “slowdown” and some vendors in the space cutting jobs. Well, gosh, 5G is a wireless network evolution, a conversion from a prior standard. Like any conversion, it…
It’s always good to see stories based on real user experiences, and when MIT Technology Review, in partnership with Databricks, published a report called “The great acceleration: CIO perspectives on generative AI” I was naturally curious to see how what they found compared with my own chats with CIOs and others. I want to stress…
Sometimes, the terms we use create an impression that really isn’t justified. For example, we talk about “enterprise networks” as though they were a static model of connectivity when in fact they’ve undergone major changes over the last couple decades. And yes, there are more changes underway now, to the point where the concept of…