Mobile services rule, that’s a fact of life for the operators. For decades, they’ve been more profitable than wireline services, and increasingly they’re being used to make customer relationships sticky, pulling through wireline broadband in a competitive market. Comcast, for example, has long had an MVNO relationship with Verizon and uses its mobile offerings to…
Telco Capex, Infrastructure Technology Trends, and Vendor Opportunity
Like most analysts, I don’t often cite or praise the work of other analysts, but today I want to give a shout-out to Omdia for a figure they posted on LinkedIn, titled “Global telecoms capex flow, 2021”. It makes, in convenient graphics form, some of the points I’ve been raising in the evolution of telecommunications…
An Attempt to Assess Section 230
“No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” This text, part of Section 230 of 47 US Code, is often called “the 26 words that created the the Internet”. It’s this specific section that the US Supreme…
Looking at the Buyer Side of NaaS
One of the tech topics that seems hardest to track is “network-as-a-service” or NaaS. Like a lot of technologies, NaaS is subject to what we could kindly call “opportunistic redefinition”, meaning NaaS-washing. When that happens, definitions tend to get fuzzy because vendors broaden the definitions to ride the media wave. I wondered whether we might…
Cisco Comes out of “Follower” into “Fast”
Let’s start by looking what we’d like to learn from the Cisco earnings call held Wednesday. Yes, it’s nice to know how Cisco did, particularly relative to competitors like Juniper. Yes, it’s nice to know how they characterize their quarter and what guidance they offer. What’s nicer is relating the Cisco information to the conditions…
The Hype and Hope of Open RAN
Is “Open RAN” in 5G something we should welcome, or be afraid of? Is it all a part of the 5G hype, is it its own hype category, or is it not hype at all? What’s its relevance to telecom infrastructure overall? All of these are important questions, so let’s try to answer them. “Open…
Is AI an Extension of Automation? If So, that Could be Bad
I’ve blogged multiple times on AI and ChatGPT, so you may be bored with the topic. Bear with me, because this time I’m going to look at what the real, long-term, threat of the technology could be. It may not be as simply scary as it’s popularly portrayed, but in the long term it could…
All the Facts, Always the Truth
That’s the promise of Andover Intel, and we really mean it. There’s too much hype out there, and we all waste too much time with it. What we’re going to do here is simple. We’re going to talk about the important developments in networking, information technology, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. We’re going to look…
Could Juniper be On the Verge of a Seismic Positioning Change?
Over the last two years, I’ve been pretty clear regarding the importance of virtual networking. It’s not only that the use of the cloud, and the expanded use of virtualization and containers in the data center, demands it. SD-WAN is a form of virtual networking that’s exploding as a means of connecting thin sites and…
Private 5G: Now Dead or Never Alive?
It’s already getting hard to find positive things being said about 5G, and candidly most of the negativity is well-deserved. Hype doesn’t conquer all; although it does produce more interesting stories, reality eventually impinges. At any rate, Light Reading offered another round in the 5G downside fight, with the story on how the shine is…