I don’t think there’s anyone out there who wouldn’t agree that AI, and in particular generative AI, is a fast-moving technology. There are literally dozens of announcements relating to it every week, and the sum of these are creating not only increased interest and opportunity, but also increased confusion and indecision. One CIO told me…
Before the US Labor Day holiday, I promised to look at a question operators have been asking for a couple of decades. Is there a way of building networks that would reduce opex? By that, I mean “Is it possible to design infrastructure in a way that’s less opex-intensive”, and that has two answers, depending…
You probably know by now that one of my pet peeves is a technology concept that’s essentially an invitation to self-definition. Such a concept cannot fail because you get to define it around your standard of success. It’s universal because everyone sees in it what they want to see. It’s great for generating media attention…
One of the greatest frustrations for the network operators plying their broadband trade is the fact that competition demands they push speeds upward, with 1G now substandard and speeds as high as 8G being touted, even as customers reject these speeds when offered. A recent article quoted Calix as saying that less than 20% of…
If you look at the things network operators say have helped them control costs the most, opex reductions top that list for well over 90% of operators. In contrast, only 67% say that capex reductions have been a help. The problem is that almost all of the operators who say that opex reductions have helped…
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…