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…
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…
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…
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…
For this third and final blog in my “contextual services” series, I’ll look at the actual higher-level software requirements for the concept. Remember that my goal in the series is to frame a set of facilitating services or features that would be exposed via APIs and provide operators with a means of wholesaling capabilities to…
If, as I speculated yesterday, the optimum new-service strategy for network operators would be a set of facilitating services that exploited contextualization and personalization of mobile behavior, what would the technology requirements look like? Operators need to balance feature specificity to raise the value of their services to the OTTs who would frame them in…
What are the network operators, the service providers or ISPs, going to do? As the Things Past and Things to Come podcast said today, there’s a lot of bad signs coming in a space that’s had little else for over a decade. Operators have faced a consistent drop in revenue per bit, and it’s proved…
Google has always been a technology byword, the source of things like Kubernetes. One of its ideas, a project called “Loon” was supposed to provide Internet services through a network of balloons, a notion that sure sounds outlandish and didn’t get far. Now, some of the Loon concepts are reappearing in a Google spinout, Aalyria….
The idea of stepping around or beyond the cloud seems almost heretical these days, but the fact is that if we consider “the cloud” to mean cloud platforms and infrastructure, we already step around/beyond it every day. The question is the best way to do that for network services. The technology that deploys, redeploys, scales,…
For decades, it’s been clear to many that the way we use addresses on the Internet and in other IP networks may be less than ideal. An address represents a network service access point, but we tend to use it (or want to) as a reference to an application, user, or database. In the real…