We’ve heard nothing but doom and gloom for telcos in the race to relevance, and two Light Reading stories frame the latest round. The first story says that the digital transformation race is leaving telcos behind, and the second story that the big tech elephant is squashing telecom. The combination presents a view that the…
VMware is stepping up in telco cloud. There’s no question that the company is drawing its positioning line in the sand, and there’s no question that it has the market position to make that line into a promise to buyers and a threat to competitors. The only question is how the moves will balance out;…
Streaming is the current revolution in video delivery. OK, it may get its biggest boost from the fact that it can deliver video to smartphones and other devices over any good Internet connection, but it also has competitive benefits…and risks. Comcast, the biggest cable operator in the US, may be taking the competitive gloves off…
Specialized microprocessors for smartphones aren’t anything new, but we’re starting to see (from Google, for example) custom processors for smartphones from the phone vendors themselves. Apple has introduced their own microprocessor chip for PCs, and Amazon has used its own customized chip for some cloud services since 2018. NVIDIA GPUs have been available in the…
Facebook is said to be considering renaming itself to claim ownership of the “metaverse”, which has led to many (especially those who, like me, are hardly part of the youth culture) wonder just what that means. The fact is that the metaverse is important, perhaps even pivotal, in our online evolution. It may also be…
The recent Facebook outage, which took down all the company’s services and much of its internal IT structure, certainly frustrated users, pressured the company’s network operations staff, and alarmed Internet-watchers. The details of the problem are still sketchy, but there’s a good account of how it evolved available from Cloudflare. Facebook said that human error…
VMware, like most vendors, has regular events designed to showcase their new products and services, and VMware’s VMWorld 2021 event is such a showcase. The stories the company told this year are particularly important given that the separation of VMware and Dell is onrushing, and everyone (including Wall Street and VMware’s customers) are wondering how…
Everyone in telecom is surely aware of the push of public cloud providers into the telco world. Amazon and Microsoft have long offered telcos hosting of elements of 5G and other “telco cloud” applications. Google now wants to get into the game, or rather get into it on a more serious basis. There are a…
What factors limit the adoption of new technologies? This question is critical for things like IoT, 5G, and even AI, but we don’t seem to have much of a track record in answering it. I used to jokingly say that our view was “technology sucks”, meaning that simply making a new technology available sucked money…
Numbers are always interesting, and sometimes there’s more interesting if you look at them in a different context. There’s a really interesting piece in The Next Platform on data center shifts, and I’d like to take that different look at it to raise some points I think are important. The article’s thrust is that the…