Networking is the business of traffic and capacity, supply and demand, and we have some news in both of these spaces. I’d love to say that we had news suggesting that the balancing of these two factors—critical for any market—was being achieved. I can’t. Like politics, business often bogs down in posturing and fails to…
One of the kingpins in Juniper’s financial future, according to the Street at least, is the success of its PTX strategy. PTX is an optical-core evolution that responds to network operator pressure for some way to build IP cores other than with humungous gigarouters. We noted at the time that we believed that the PTX…
The flap over usage pricing, renewed last week by announcements by AT&T and TW, has raised again the question of how network infrastructure might respond to a new broadband world, one where unlimited usage no longer stimulates new apps. In such a future, operators would be accepting a role of bit-pusher, and the growth of…
AT&T surprised nobody and angered everybody (or at least almost everybody) when they announced that they were now imposing metered usage on all unlimited-data plans at specific cap rates per month. The announcement comes just as the MWC show ends, a show that seemed more interested in promoting new things to do with cheap bandwidth…
Well, MWC is all but over at this point and I have to say that while I’d love to have sunned a bit in Barcelona I’m not sorry I didn’t attend. Judging from the comments I’ve received from operators and financial analysts at the show, it didn’t move the ball very much. If there was…
Cisco followed up on Chambers’ vague comments about small-cell support with an announcement of its own Hotspot 2.0 WiFi roaming products, particularly a gateway designed to manage small-cell connection into a mobile network. The move comes as network equipment vendors work hard to address the changes in networking being driven by the increased emphasis on…
The second day of MWC is demonstrating a show that’s seemingly polarizing between appliances and tiny cells. Obviously the trends are linked, and obviously the industry’s long-term health and direction may depend on how—and how well—the marketplace manages to link them. We’re seeing an explosion in tablet sizes as vendors try to figure out what…
MWC kicks off this week, a show working to transition itself to relevance in a market that’s trying to do the same. The questions are first whether either of the two transitions are possible, and second whether there’s a single direction that accomplishes both. For the show, relevance means embracing social networks, handsets, developer programs,…
The M&A in network equipment continues, but it also continues to involve primarily specialty firms being picked up by the giants. The latest is Cisco’s buy of optical specialist Lightwire, a company that’s specializing in creating optical interfaces whose low power dissipation (heat) means they can be packed more densely. That’s a pretty solid indication…
HP’s numbers, like those from rival Dell, disappointed the Street, and this raises the question of whether tech capital spending might be showing an impact from the “project” issues I outlined in Netwatcher this month. Projects that advance IT overall just aren’t being launched as much, so spending is stagnating. The explanations offered by…