We’re reading all the time about how Web3 or the metaverse or blockchain are going to revolutionize the Internet. What the heck is a blockchain, as it’s applied to either Web3 or metaverse? I’m sure that you’ve already seen stories that assert a given vendor or service provider is at the forefront of one or…
Research reports are always interesting, but like anything these days, you have to consider the question of bias. Nobody is going to publish research that contradicts their own market positioning and sales efforts, which is why individual companies’ research is nearly always suspect. Organizations like the TMF, representing a collection of companies, are sometimes immune…
What do we need to see, condition-wise, for Open RAN (or other open-model networking) initiatives to succeed? There are plenty of articles on this question, but nearly all focus on a single technical/business issue directly related to Open RAN itself. As an industry, we tend to look at technology changes as isolated processes, with little…
We might be facing a major, even seismic, shift in networking. How are vendors going to respond? Will the changes that we could see have an impact on their ranking, even on their bottom lines? The situation is still very fluid, but there are some early signs and signals we can try to read. There…
I’ve noted several times in recent blogs that AT&T is at a disadvantage versus rival Verizon because of the sharp difference in their demand densities, the effectiveness of infrastructure to address opportunity in their service areas. That’s not a good thing, to be sure, but it has given AT&T the incentive to do something that…
A unified lifecycle automation model, as I noted in my blog on March 15th, seems to be the only way for operators to stabilize or reduce opex, now that they’ve used customer care portals to pick the low apples of high-touch support. I’ve suggested that this would likely involve creating a single state/event-driven model for…
What is the goal, the real and ultimate goal, of service lifecycle automation? That may seem like a stupid question, and in more than one dimension. First-off, everyone knows that service lifecycle automation is supposed to cut opex. Many know that opex is actually a bigger portion of each revenue dollar operators earn than capex…
It’s pretty clear that fixed broadband access is changing. Both CATV and fiber-based operators are raising their speeds, to 2 or even 4Gbps. AT&T, who a year ago wasn’t all that positive on fixed wireless access (FWA) as an option now says that they’re going to retire more and more copper, replacing it with fiber…
Inevitably, the technology news cycle follows a pattern of hype-the-plus to exaggerate-the-minuses. We have two recent stories that seem to pit one extreme and the other, one that says that the cloud in general and multi-cloud in particular has “hit a wall”, and another that says that “there’s no going back from multicloud”. Can we…
The hierarchy/intent modeling approach I’ve blogged about, similar to the TMF SID, seems to serve the mission of service management automation well. It also seems possible to use a similar modeling technique to represent real-world “digital twin” relationships, and (finally) it seems possible to use a digital-twinning approach that represents features rather than real-world elements…