Mobile is not only the hottest spot in service provider infrastructure, it’s probably the only hot spot. Mobile profits and revenues still show some glimmers of hope even though ARPU is expected to plateau late this year and start its slow decline next year. My model says that operators are looking to make some smart…
Every once in a while I get a break and have some time to review the comments people make on my semi-annual surveys. The quantitative results can be tabulated pretty quickly but I have to grab a minute here and there to see what people have added as clarifying/expanding remarks, and it’s usually worth the…
I’ve been looking at the impact of the cloud, SDN, NFV and all of the rest of the growing list of acronyms. My focus has been on the network equipment side, and the vendors who supply it, but there’s another piece of the puzzle, the IT side. Whatever functionality leaves purpose-built network devices arrives somewhere…
We’re living in a period when every day someone proposes a new networking revolution, and I find it interesting that the networking revolutions that we’ve really tried to bring about are still in the smoky-room-unshaven-anarchist phase. Five years ago, network operators had three priorities for monetization, the top one being content. As of last fall,…
You’re familiar by now with my rants on how we’ve decomposed ecosystemic shifts like the cloud, SDN, and (eventually perhaps but hopefully not) NFV. What has to be considered as a whole new cooperative model for IT and networking is instead being looked at as a bunch of disconnected product changes that might lead to…
There are always a few announcements or news items in a week that by themselves don’t make the grade in justifying extensive comment, but that might demonstrate something as a collection. This week we have just that, with announcements from Arista Networks, Mellanox and 6WIND, and BTI Systems. All of these announcements are cast in…
I have to admit that I never was wild about trade shows. Not only are they a madhouse, if you’re an independent like me you end up paying to be somewhere that people can find you to tell you lies. I got to the point where I was happy to see somebody who was just…
Sometimes you look for the wrong monsters under the bed. IBM made an announcement today demonstrating that’s true in networking, and in two dimensions. They came out with specific support for Network Functions Virtualization and they announced a successful partnership (with Connectem) to field virtualized mobile core infrastructure for Optus in Australia. This shows that…
We’re likely going to see a lot of “SDN announcements” in 2013, most of which will (like most of what we’ve seen already) be marketing crap. The simple truth is that SDN is about central control over packet forwarding. If you’re not centrally controlled, you’re not SDN. If you aren’t about forwarding packets you aren’t…
MWC is kicking off today, and operators tell me their own hope for the show and for the year is a strategy to raise revenues and profits. Well, I’m a poetry fan, and so I offer a snippet of a poem to guide them through their perusal of vendors’ wares, from John Keats: Heard melodies…