MWC generated a lot of announcements in the Open RAN space, not surprisingly. That makes it harder to dig through to identify relevant trends, I’ve picked out some specific announcements that I think fit a pattern and offer some useful insights into where mobile networks, and networking overall, may be heading. SDxCentral did a piece…
What is the relationship between the metaverse and augmented or virtual reality? The question relates not only to just how realistic the metaverse ends up being, but also to the question of how far metaverse-friendly technology might percolate out to other areas. That has significant implications on a lot of things, including conference/collaboration and edge…
I blogged last week about AT&T’s vision of a future where new service features built on connectivity would serve as a platform for OTTs to create true higher-layer services. That obviously raises the question of what those features might be, and I’ve been trying to get some insight from operator contacts and a bit of…
Who, if anyone, could actually move everything to the cloud? I’ve never been a fan of the “move-to-the-cloud” model because my data has always shown a different trajectory for cloud growth, but the view that a full migration is inevitable is pretty pervasive. What can we say about that, based on information from enterprises and…
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…