Ericsson, Huawei, and NSN have entered into a somewhat-historic agreement to break down interoperability barriers for OSS/BSS systems. OSSii is essentially an agreement to share interface specifications not to cooperate in broader development, or to set new standards for OSS/BSS interoperability (still largely under the TM Forum). The promise is to facilitate rollouts of new…
Anyone who’s read my blogs knows I’m no fan of current FCC Chairman Genachowski. I’ve always believed his role in the VC-and-startup world has made him too much a fan of Internet novelty and not enough a fan of reality. In particular, I’ve been critical of the neutrality position he’s championed, which includes the preservation…
It’s “recap Friday” again, and there are a lot of little items that (as usual) add up to some significant industry trends. Facing important truths about something you depend on is never easy, and it looks like the industry as a whole and some companies in particular are now going to have to do that….
Software, in defining networks, shouldn’t be expected to cull through a lot of details on network operation. But yes it should. SDN will be the agent of making applications a part of the network itself. No, that’s NFV’s role, or maybe it’s nobody’s role because it’s not even a goal. If you listen to the…
Light Reading made an interesting point yesterday in commenting about this year’s Interop show. I’ve been to Interop in the past, and it’s always been the bastion of Big Network Iron. Now it may be about to show its softer side, if you believe the advance comments on keynotes and vendor announcements. Trade shows drive…
Today we have the network sequitur and the network non sequitur. In the former category I place the Alcatel-Lucent comments on the demise (or surrender) of their API efforts, and in the latter I place the Cisco guy leaving for Big Switch. And amid all of this, I see tooth fairies and trolls. Some people…
Juniper has released an SDN Controller based on its Contrail acquisition, and the early state of the material makes it difficult to judge just how much of an advance the JunosV Contrail product is, for the industry or for Juniper. I want to stress that I was not briefed on the announcement and so have…
If you look at the developments in the SDN, NFV, and cloud areas, you find that there’s a lot of discussion about “services” and “APIs”. One of the things I realized when I was reviewing some material from Intel/Aepona and Cisco was that there’s a bit of a disconnect in terms of how “services” and…
This has been a pretty active week in terms of happenings of real relevance to the future of networking. We’ve also had some background stuff going on, things that don’t rise to the level of being part of the revolution for various reasons. Taken as a whole, they may be a signpost into how the…
Virtualizing network functionality is the aim of a surprisingly large number of initiatives these days, for a surprisingly large number of reasons. In NFV, operators focused on cost savings versus custom devices in their seminal paper on the initiative, but in SDN the focus is on improving network operations and stability. Other operators have been…