The metaverse took a step (in some direction or another) with the formation of a standards body called “The Metaverse Standards Forum” (a more technical view can be found HERE). Meta is unsurprisingly initiating the move, with Microsoft support, and other tech giants like Adobe and Nvidia have joined. The body offers the potential benefit…
Some Top-Down Service Lifecycle Modeling and Orchestration Commentary
Most of you know that I’ve been an advocate of intent-modeled, model-driven, networking for almost two decades. This approach would divide a service into functional/deployable elements, each represented by a “black box” intent model responsible for meeting an SLA. This approach has some major advantages, in my view, and also a few complications. Operators generally…
Will Crypto-Crashes also Crash Web3 and the Metaverse?
Crypto has surely had its problems recently, even major problems. Meta has been under pressure too, and there are signs that the Web3 hype wave has already crested. Is there a connection between these events, either in the sense that there’s a common underlying issue, or in the sense that one problem area might feed…
Google’s Private 5GaaS: A Good Move but Needs Better Singing
Google is entering the private 5G space, so the story goes, but what it’s likely doing is a bit more profound than that. Does it mean that “private 5G” is going to take off? Does that mean that public 5G is in even more trouble than some have said? Is something even more potentially disruptive…
How Did IBM Buck the Tech Downturn?
Let’s face it, this hasn’t been a good quarter, even a good year, for tech. Given that, how is it that an IT company that’s been around for longer than most of today’s technology professionals have lived seems to be doing more than OK? IBM seems to be bucking the downturn. What can we learn…
Optimization, Virtualization, and Orchestration
What makes virtualization, whether it be IT or network, work? The best definition for virtualization, IMHO, is that it’s a technology set that creates a behavioral abstraction of infrastructure that behaves like the real infrastructure would. To make that true, you need an abstraction and a realization, the latter being a mapping of a virtual…
There’s a New Flow Optimization Algorithm; What Might Need It?
One problem that networks have posed from the first is how to optimize them. An optimum network, of course, is in the eye of the beholder; you have to have a standard you’re trying to meet to talk about optimization. Networks can be optimized by flow and by cost, and most experts have always believed…
Cloud-Native, Composable Services, and Network Functions
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…
Getting Telecom Beyond the Dumb Pipe
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…
Is the Broadcom deal for VMware a smart, even pivotal, move?
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…