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…
One size, we know both from lore and from experience, doesn’t fit all. The same is true for access technologies. We’re reading stories about the rise of fiber, like this one that quotes Consolidated Communications saying “There are some mobile or temporary use cases where FWA is best, he says, but for the majority of…
Private 5G is even more difficult to assess, in value-proposition terms, than 5G overall. My own chats with enterprises suggest that there’s really not all that much going on. Other sources suggest otherwise, and are looking at possible “private 5G models”. TelecomTV has a story on this, and we’ll use that today to look a…
Many broadband providers have traditionally offered both business and consumer services, but cable companies have often been strongly biased toward consumers because of their cable TV roots. Now, cable giant Comcast, having acquired Masergy, is looking for a stronger business position, even for enterprises. It’s a logical move, given that their telco competitors are all…