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…
Would the metaverse be good for operators? That question was touched on in a Light Reading piece on MWC, which pointed out (correctly) that the show was surprisingly short on “mobile” news. It was bigger, at least, on metaverse, which prompted the author to comment “Nobody could explain why the metaverse is a good thing…
In the last two blogs on modeling, I reviewed “service modeling” and “virtual-application modeling” and determined that the digital-twin approach wasn’t optimum. I then reviewed the metaverse and IoT applications’ use of modeling, and determined that the hierarchy/intent approach wasn’t optimal. This would seem to argue that there are two missions and two models, and…
Many of you know that I use a survey-driven demand model to forecast stuff, and recently I decided to run the model on one of my favorite topics, managed services. The model forecast significant growth over the next five years, peaking in 2025 at an annual level of over 50%. That’s sure interesting, so I…