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…
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…
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…
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…
It’s not likely that many doubt that network spending is under pressure. That’s true even in the mobile space, despite all the hype that’s been surrounding 5G. We’ve heard a lot about open-model networking, not only in 5G with O-RAN but with white-box switching and routing. We’ve heard that hosted features and functions are the…
A Google employee raised a lot of ire by suggesting that AI could have a soul. That question is way out of my job description, but not so with questions that might lead up to it. Are AI elements “sentient” today? Are they “conscious” or “self-aware?” At least one researcher claims to have created a…
Nokia surprised a lot of people by beating Q2 forecasts, sending its stock up on July 21st. It’s beating rival Ericsson in stock performance for 3, 6, and 12 months, too. Ericsson, as I noted in a blog on July 18th, has bet billions on a Vonage acquisition, and Nokia seems to have been on…
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…