Let’s face it, Cisco’s quarter was bad, and nothing management says can alter that. Supply chain issues may have been a factor, but it’s hard to justify the miss and the weak guidance Cisco supported with that excuse (one, by the way, that all the vendors who have weak quarters have been using). They did…
VMware and the Open Grid Alliance MIGHT Move the Edge Compute Ball
VMware has been making a lot of Open RAN announcements, and that’s important. Yes, it demonstrates the strength of the whole open-model network approach. Yes, it demonstrates the strength of the Open RAN movement and the impact that might have on telecom infrastructure. The real story, though, is that all Open RAN successes don’t have…
Public Cloud Winners and Winning Strategies
The rich get richer, so the saying goes, and in the public cloud space that’s likely true, because the big are getting bigger. According to an article in SDxCentral, the big three of public cloud (Amazon, Google, and Microsoft) took a larger share of cloud spending—62% in the latest quarter versus 58% a year ago….
What Can We Expect from Ultra Fast Wireline Broadband?
The old “How low can you go?” question may be, for broadband at least, be augmented by the question “How much capacity can we sell?” As this story in Light Reading shows, at least some operator planners are looking onward to things like 10G consumer broadband services. While this might be generating what the media…
Are We Reaching the Limit of Ad Sponsorship?
The last week has demonstrated that some of the biggest Internet players are now facing financial, or at least stock-price, challenges. For many, the problem is in their revenue model. We’re seeing, in the aftermath of the pandemic, both the strength and the weakness in the “free ad-sponsored” vision of OTT services. The questions to…
Acquisition and Retention: The Real Opex Challenge
Network operators typically spend almost four times as much on customer acquisition and retention as they will on traditional network operations. That’s up almost a third over a five-year period, and it has major implications for the way we think about managing operations costs, since customer A&R is usually lumped into operations expenses. Why is…
Implementation Considerations for the Three VNF Categories
Microservices, cloud-native practices, and service mesh technologies are all popular in cloud development. Does that mean they’re essential in the development of telco applications? Should VNFs be cloud-native microservices, connected via a service mesh? I pointed out in THIS blog that there are very different missions associated with virtual functions, and that the mission determines…
Business Spending on Tech in 2022: Hopeful
There’s some good news for the IT and networking sectors from Wall Street, but it’s not unqualified good news. Generally, 2022 numbers are not only looking better than 2021’s (no great feat) but more significantly, they’re looking better than they were earlier this year. However, there were still a significant number of enterprises who expected…
Who Has the Best 5G Strategy, Verizon or AT&T?
Verizon and AT&T have been locked in some form of competitive (with ownership of Bell companies playing a role) embrace since the Bell System broke up. Verizon has a major advantage in demand density, the ability of a market to pay back on network infrastructure, and AT&T has been perhaps the most radical Tier One…
Thoughts on a PaaS API Set for NFV and Edge Computing
How would you build an optimum service layer and PaaS for Nephio? If I think the project needs to face those tasks, then I should be prepared to comment on how it could be done. The starting point for that, as always, is at the top of the process, which is the notion of a…