I probably watch AT&T more closely than I do any telco, any network operator. Not only have I chatted with literally hundreds of AT&T people over the years, I’m convinced that they are a poster child for “telco-tries-to-be-realistic”, and I certainly think they need to do that. I also think this quarter’s earnings prove that…
One of the things that 5G and the notion of “virtual network functions” has done is demonstrate that “provisioning” is getting a lot more complicated. A virtual function that mirrors a physical device lives in two worlds, one the world of network operations and the other the world of application/cloud hosting. If we expand our…
I blogged yesterday to ask the tech industry “What Lies Beyond?” What I want to do here, and what I deliberately did not do yesterday, was try to answer that question. That’s because my answer would move from analytical assessment of what I consider to be hard facts, to interpretations that in the end are…
Why is it that we always seem to miss the obvious? OK, we had a COVID wave, during which some areas were locked down and many people avoided going out, particularly to “social gatherings”. Economic data shows that they accumulated record savings. What happens when the restrictions on their lives are lifted? Answer: They spend…
Ericsson has announced that it’s received final regulatory approval for its acquisition of Vonage, a “communications service provider” that’s long been an OTT play. For many analysts (both telecom and Wall Street) this was a head-scratcher from the first and now it’s happening. Is there any rationality behind it, or is it a knee-jerk reaction…
Nobody doubts that network operators are looking for new revenue sources. Even the operators themselves doubt that there’s much consensus on what sources might be credible. An idea that’s floated around both operators and OTTs is what a recent Light Reading article refers to as a “super app”. Patterned after the WeChat app in China,…
One very interesting thing I’ve started seeing is an increased operator focus on “service orchestration”, a topic that’s dear to me but has been as much tire-kicking as real commitment on the operator side. What’s behind this, and where might it be taking things? I interact with a lot of operator people, but in most…
Does SASE equal SSE plus SD-WAN? This question, arising from a recent email I got, shows to me how far we’ve diverted from reality here. Only one of these acronyms actually has a fairly firm definition, and even it has significant variations in implementation. The other two are media/analyst inventions, so what do we gain…
What, exactly, is the relationship between AI and security? We hear a lot about AI these days, and though my own data doesn’t come close to the level of AI adoption some surveys claim to find, it does show that the number of enterprises with actual AI applications has tripled since 2021, which represents pretty…
Everyone who’s read my blogs knows that I believe that “metro” is the value bastion of the future for network operators. Juniper did a “Cloud Metro” announcement over a year ago, the first and most significant such announcement by a network vendor, and I’ve been waiting to see how they developed the theme. That question…