Most network operators have their hopes pinned on 5G and IoT, and it’s already clear that a lot of these hopes will be dashed simply because both concepts have been over-hyped. Now, to make matters worse, there’s a growing concern that the implementation of 5G, and support for IoT applications, may have created a significant…
Comcast Goes Live with Xfinity Stream
Cable companies offered TV from the first, and were also among the first to offer broadband Internet. Now there are indicators that they’ll be separating the two. Comcast is about to go live with its Xfinity Stream service, which will be available on Roku and Amazon streaming devices and on some TVs, with other platforms…
Is Amazon Going to Give Us Real Robots?
Amazon’s decision to buy iRobot, the company that makes the popular Roomba robotic vacuum, has stirred a lot of speculation, ranging from some solid business questions to the expected speculation that this is just the latest round in the effort to have robots take over the world. Are robots poised to overtake AI as the…
Will Cisco’s Big Organizational Change Help, or Hurt?
If we have a shape of things to come, maybe now we have an organization of things to come. That’s what Cisco is promoting, at least, with the announcement it would be combining the enterprise networking and mass infrastructure groups. The challenge here is first to decide if the decision was driven, as some say,…
Any Interest in a Podcast?
A number of those who know me or have read my blog have asked me about doing a podcast. I’ve been looking into the concept, but the problem is that there’s a fair amount of work in prepping one, and also a cost getting it hosted. I can’t justify that on the same free-no-sponsorship basis…
Why Services are Different From Applications in Orchestration
I’ve talked about service modeling and lifecycle automation, and about the software that’s needed to make a modeled service effective. It’s time to look at another related issue, which is the issue of just what you’re orchestrating. While it’s popular to talk about “cloud-native” technology for network features, the cloud is an application hosting technology…
Where Does the MEF’s LSO Model Fit in Lifecycle Automation?
One of my favorite authors on networking in the last century (it sure feels odd writing that!) was Tannenbaum, and I loved his quote in “Computer Networks”; where he said “The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.” We could say that about standards bodies these days, and one…
5G Winners and Losers: What Differentiates Them?
Every new technology creates winners and losers, and 5G is no exception. Light Reading talks about this, specifically in terms of mobile operators, but I think we need to look a bit harder at this issue. 5G is important to operators and vendors alike, after all, and it’s also important to use 5G as an…
Where is Meta Taking the Metaverse Now?
Meta’s quarter missed across the board. This is its second quarter of issues, and its stock has been declining steadily, to the point where it’s lost about half its value. Obviously this isn’t a good thing for Meta, but the big question is what it might mean to the OTT space, the metaverse, and the…
A Software-Centric View of Service Orchestration and Automation
What would an intent-modeled service lifecycle automation system look like? I’ve often talked about service modeling as an element in such a system, but what about the actual software? A service model without the related software is the classic “day without sunshine”, and in the early 2000s, an operator group in Europe actually pointed out…