I get a lot of comments and feedback from vendors, enterprises, and network operators. Recently, there’s been an uptick on topics related to Network Functions Virtualization, NFV. Some of this has apparently come out of the increased activity around Google’s Nephio initiative, which aims at creating a Kukbernetes-based management and orchestration framework. Some has come…
Many people have heard the “A rose by any other name…” quote. Let me offer a network technology slant on that, which is “A dumb pipe created by any technology is still a dumb pipe”. Given that we’ve got operator and vendor commentary that takes the opposite stance, we apparently need to look a bit…
OK, Broadcom is buying VMware, and most of the comments I’ve seen from industry analysts or the Street have been, well, doubtful. I guess that makes it fair play that I have doubts about their doubts. There are potential issues raised by the deal, but they’re not spectacularly different from the issues raised by any…
Let’s face it, Cisco’s quarter was bad, and nothing management says can alter that. Supply chain issues may have been a factor, but it’s hard to justify the miss and the weak guidance Cisco supported with that excuse (one, by the way, that all the vendors who have weak quarters have been using). They did…
VMware has been making a lot of Open RAN announcements, and that’s important. Yes, it demonstrates the strength of the whole open-model network approach. Yes, it demonstrates the strength of the Open RAN movement and the impact that might have on telecom infrastructure. The real story, though, is that all Open RAN successes don’t have…
The rich get richer, so the saying goes, and in the public cloud space that’s likely true, because the big are getting bigger. According to an article in SDxCentral, the big three of public cloud (Amazon, Google, and Microsoft) took a larger share of cloud spending—62% in the latest quarter versus 58% a year ago….
The old “How low can you go?” question may be, for broadband at least, be augmented by the question “How much capacity can we sell?” As this story in Light Reading shows, at least some operator planners are looking onward to things like 10G consumer broadband services. While this might be generating what the media…
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…