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…
Continuing our media ramp-up to MWC, Ericsson announced it’s buying WiFi player BelAir, a step that follows a previous Alcatel-Lucent move in the WiFi direction. As I said at the time, WiFi is a kind of collateral success, pulled through by a combination of bandwidth-hungry appliances like smartphones and tablets and the inevitable truth that…
F5 is buying a signal networking player Traffix, who specializes in the DIAMETER protocol used often in mobile IMS networks, a move that signals that the company is going to launch an attack on the backhaul and mobile-service infrastructure space in earnest. What Traffix provides create what us effectively a signaling overlay network, and we…
The LightSquared drama continues with news that the company has failed to make an agreed payment to satellite provider Immarsat, and that some investors in the hedge fund that launched the venture were suing the fund. There are also indications that some vendors may be under pressure from the likely failure of the venture, NSN…
Net neutrality has been a thorny issue for the industry from the first, and the importance of finding a rational policy increases as network operators come closer to the point of “ARPU turnaround”, when the revenue-per-user curve flattens and then falls. Since traffic per user is increasing, this turn-around point spells the time when future…