The biggest question the month of October raised, for most of us at least, is what’s happening to tech. The answer, of course, is that a lot is happening, and most of that is what’s been predictable from the first. All hype waves hit the beach, and in October we’ve seen a lot of beaching….
Is the “Age of Integration” Upon Us?
We’d love to think that advances in the tech sector come about because of successes, but what might be the most consequential advance these days is a result of failures. Integration services are hot already and getting hotter, and according to enterprises the reasons lie mostly in faults in the way we create and explain…
The Architecture for a Separate Control Plane in Networks
I blogged last week about the value of, or perhaps the necessity of, separating the control and user planes in 5G. The main point I was addressing was that servers and cloud software aren’t really optimal for pushing packets at high speeds and high volumes. If the control plane were broken out, the user plane…
The Shape of the Future Robot
There’s no question that AI is important. There shouldn’t be a question that robots is also important, but Amazon’s long interest in robotics, it’s Astro proto-robot, its desire to acquire iRobot, and the rumors I’ve heard that Google, Microsoft, and Meta are all looking at robots should be proof enough. Amazon’s Astro and the rumors…
What’s the Missing Ingredient in Open-Model Networking?
I’ve blogged often on the importance of 5G function hosting to the deployment of edge computing. If operators were to create a “carrier cloud” to host virtual functions for 5G and other service missions, the resource pool created could then be available to host generalized edge applications. That could advance edge computing significantly. It may…
Operator Services and Profits in the Cloud Era
Networks are obviously anchored in connectivity services offered by network operators, carriers, service providers, ISPs, or whatever you’d like to call them. But all these terms are going to fall away except for one, which is ISP. The only “network” anyone will subscribe to in the future will be the Internet, and the Internet and…
How the Real Cloud-First Changes Everything
I’m a programmer and software architect by background, and a student of computing history. I’ve seen the transformation of computing from the retrospective analysis of “keypunched” paper records of retail transactions to highly interactive assistance with online, real-time, activity. Through that, computers have migrated from data center to desktop to smartphones in our hands, and…
Can We Shake Our Addiction to Ad-Sponsored Online Services?
While an old-time science fiction writer once said “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”, consumers of online services have been binging on free stuff from the first. Of course, “free” really means “ad sponsored”, and since everyone is used to ad sponsorship through TV commercials, applying the concept to online experiences doesn’t…
Facing the New Model of Technology Adoption
One of the hardest lessons we all have to learn in life is that you can’t go back to the past. I suspect everyone has had a personal lesson on that topic, but the same principle applies on a broader scale, to populations and economies. We need to learn it now. One of the things…
What the H*** does “Cloud Networking” mean?
Is there any such thing as “cloud networking”? On one level that seems like a dumb question, but if you look deeper into it, you see that we have a whole range of vague and often contradictory definitions. That’s too bad, because it’s clear that the cloud is transforming computing and applications, and because the…