If we assume that 5G will continue to drive telco spending this year, what specific part of telco spending is getting the push, and what vendors are benefitting. According to an SDxCentral piece that cites an analyst report, the answer might be pretty revealing, but not necessarily in exactly the way that the report suggests….
Can Openness be Merchandised, Even in Networks?
Everyone loves open technology, except of course vendors who have to compete with it. Still, even vendors seem to embrace it or at least rely on it in some areas, and there’s growing interest in having open technologies drive us into areas where innovation seems to have stalled out. With all of these positives, though,…
Fixing Operator Developer Programs (and Knowing When They’re Not Fixable)
Everyone seems to love developer programs. They promise that some legion of busy programmers will rush to create stuff using your service or product, thereby driving up your sales while you sit back and rake in the proceeds. What more could you ask? Well, how about a rational developer strategy? For operators in particular, that…
Is Fiber the Only Path to Universal Broadband? Is There Any Path?
OK, call me a cynic, but I think that we tend to obsess about singular solutions to complex problems. Maybe it’s just a human need, or maybe it’s easier these days to present a single story instead of an exploration of some complex set of requirements and even-more-complex set of possible solutions. In any event,…
Are We Countering Cloud Skepticism the Wrong Way?
Starting with the tech planning cycle that some enterprises start in late fall, and running into February of 2023, I got for the first time hard indication from enterprises that they were not only putting cloud projects under greater scrutiny, but even cutting back on spending for projects already approved and deployed. Public cloud revenue…
The Telco-and-Cloud-Provider Partnership: Essential but Tricky
There are surely people out there who continue to believe that network operators, meaning telcos in particular, can catapult to profit growth on the back of traditional voice and connection services. There are also people who believe the earth is flat and that politics is a civilized tension between intelligent debaters. In assessment of profit…
Is the Tech Dump the New Norm?
There doesn’t seem to be much good news for tech companies these days. The fact that PC sales are expected to have fallen sharply in the first quarter, with Apple estimated to have lost 40%, sure seems ominous. Is all of tech going to be under pressure? What’s behind this, and when will it end?…
How Far Might Open Fiber Access Take Us?
There is no question that the most expensive part of networking is the access piece. Move inward and you quickly reach a point where hundreds of thousands of customers can be aggregated onto a single set of resources, but out in access-land it’s literally every home or business for itself. Not only that, selling a…
Is “Cloud Dominance” the Same as Cloud Monopoly?
Is “dominance” the same as “monopolistic”? That’s a question that many regulators are wrestling with, and sometimes they’re also wrestling with lobbying and nationalism. In the UK, Ofcom (the UK regulator) has been looking at public cloud services, and recently referred Amazon and Microsoft to the investigatory body in the UK (the US equivalent of…
How Many of Those Metaverse Things Do We Have, Anyway?
OK, I guess it’s time to ask (and of course, try to answer) the question “How many metaverses are there, anyway?” It’s clear when you read about the metaverse concept, and also watch a growing number of metaverse-related commercials, that the answer is greater than one. How much greater, and what’s creating both the diversity…