The last week has demonstrated that some of the biggest Internet players are now facing financial, or at least stock-price, challenges. For many, the problem is in their revenue model. We’re seeing, in the aftermath of the pandemic, both the strength and the weakness in the “free ad-sponsored” vision of OTT services. The questions to…
Network operators typically spend almost four times as much on customer acquisition and retention as they will on traditional network operations. That’s up almost a third over a five-year period, and it has major implications for the way we think about managing operations costs, since customer A&R is usually lumped into operations expenses. Why is…
Microservices, cloud-native practices, and service mesh technologies are all popular in cloud development. Does that mean they’re essential in the development of telco applications? Should VNFs be cloud-native microservices, connected via a service mesh? I pointed out in THIS blog that there are very different missions associated with virtual functions, and that the mission determines…
There’s some good news for the IT and networking sectors from Wall Street, but it’s not unqualified good news. Generally, 2022 numbers are not only looking better than 2021’s (no great feat) but more significantly, they’re looking better than they were earlier this year. However, there were still a significant number of enterprises who expected…
Verizon and AT&T have been locked in some form of competitive (with ownership of Bell companies playing a role) embrace since the Bell System broke up. Verizon has a major advantage in demand density, the ability of a market to pay back on network infrastructure, and AT&T has been perhaps the most radical Tier One…
How would you build an optimum service layer and PaaS for Nephio? If I think the project needs to face those tasks, then I should be prepared to comment on how it could be done. The starting point for that, as always, is at the top of the process, which is the notion of a…
With all the talk about virtual network functions (VNFs) in the ETSI Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) group and now in the Nephio project (see my blogs HERE and HERE), it occurs to me that we’ve not really talked much about VNFs themselves. In particular, we’ve not talked about the fact that there are multiple VNF…
In my blog last week on the Linux Foundation’s open-source function virtualization project (Nephio), I noted that two things that the project didn’t have. One was service-layer modeling and deployment and the other was a platform-as-a-service API set to define how network functions would be written. Today, I want to explain why I think the…
Finally, a decade after the concept of NFV was first introduced, we may be on track to creating a useful implementation of function hosting. The Linux Foundation and Google Cloud announced Nephio, a project that would create an open-source framework for cloud-compatible function hosting and operations automation. It could realize the goals of the “Call…
Google has been one of the great innovators, even though a lot of what they do isn’t appreciated or even known. They launched Kubernetes and Anthos for cloud hosting, their Andromeda SDN network is probably the largest SDN deployment on the planet, and they also launched the Istio service mesh. Now they want to transform…