Cisco reports its earnings tonight, so you might wonder why I’d blog about Cisco before the Big Event. The answer is that I’m not blogging about what Cisco did in the last quarter, but what it’s facing in 2014 (I may get to that last quarter on my blog on Thursday!) Chambers has been very…
We have a bit of an interesting counterpoint story this morning, involving the future of networking and how we navigate transitions. Let’s open with Blackberry, who has announced they will be forming an activity to seek bids for JVs, acquisitions, or whatever. Blackberry was the darling of the mobile phone space prior to the iPhone,…
T-Mobile has been shaking up the mobile industry with its no-contract-and-phone-upgrades plans, and they’ve worked to gain post-pay customers for the carrier, not a first but certainly a recent first. The problem is that this “good news” really isn’t more than a “transient good” because this model isn’t sustainable. Suppose you’re in the milk business. …
NSN has changed ownership but not its name, it’s simply changed what the acronym decodes to. “Nokia Solutions and Networks” is actually kind of appropriate at two levels. First, obviously, it conveys Nokia’s sole ownership of the venture. Second, it conveys that what NSN has been turning into is a “solutions” or professional services player. …
We’re a long way from the scheduled end of the ETSI NFV ISG’s work, but the initiative is already spawning implementations and perhaps a tad of NFV-washing. We have two more NFV-related announcements to talk about today, in fact. One represents the “mainstream” of NFV activity among vendors and the other represents a second orchestration…
There are always two components to any software-based solution to a problem—the software that implements the solution and the platform that software runs on. It’s not uncommon for us to take the latter for granted, but in the world of virtualization that’s a big mistake. For SDN and NFV in particular, platforms are really important…
One of the primary design goals of CloudNFV was to create a viable management framework for networks composed in whole or in part from virtual or cloud-hosted functions. Along the way we needed to deal with another of our principles; that the cloud, SDN, and NFV had to be united into a single concept. While…
Remember the concept of NGN—the “Next-Generation Network?” Some people think the Internet is it, but the Internet is a service and not really a network. Some think that it was accomplished by IP convergence, but if that’s true then what’s all the fuss about SDN and NFV about? So are we anywhere near the NGN…
I was finally able to fit in a briefing by Alcatel-Lucent on their CloudBand ecosystem and NFV strategy (not because they were unwilling but because of mutual scheduling issues). The briefing was very helpful in conveying what Alcatel-Lucent is really doing in NFV and the cloud, and it also illustrates the positioning challenges vendors face…
Yesterday I blogged a bit about mobile video and mobile viewing behavior, and today I want to follow up with some commentary and data on the fixed-line side of OTT video. The industry data shows convincingly that channelized consumption of video isn’t dropping even for fixed-line customers, but my own modeling and research shows that’s…