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…
Given that there’s an essential relationship between features and functions hosted…well…wherever and the connection network, it’s important to talk about the connection relationships involved, and in particular the service composition and federation relationships to the data plane. This is an issue that most cloud and network discussions have dodged, perhaps conveniently, and that has to…
Whether we accept the concept of the semantic web, or Web3, or the metaverse, or even fall back on lower-level things like cable’s Distributed Access Architecture (DAA), the signs are pointing toward an expansion of what we believe makes up networks in general, and the Internet in particular. That’s already been going on behind the…
Just where is the cloud, as an element of IT? We hear a lot of stuff about it, but it’s hard these days to rely much on what we hear. Is the cloud really dominating IT, is it really going to eat the data center? What can we expect from cloud providers? All this stuff…