I blogged last week about the value of, or perhaps the necessity of, separating the control and user planes in 5G. The main point I was addressing was that servers and cloud software aren’t really optimal for pushing packets at high speeds and high volumes. If the control plane were broken out, the user plane…
There’s no question that AI is important. There shouldn’t be a question that robots is also important, but Amazon’s long interest in robotics, it’s Astro proto-robot, its desire to acquire iRobot, and the rumors I’ve heard that Google, Microsoft, and Meta are all looking at robots should be proof enough. Amazon’s Astro and the rumors…
I’ve blogged often on the importance of 5G function hosting to the deployment of edge computing. If operators were to create a “carrier cloud” to host virtual functions for 5G and other service missions, the resource pool created could then be available to host generalized edge applications. That could advance edge computing significantly. It may…
Networks are obviously anchored in connectivity services offered by network operators, carriers, service providers, ISPs, or whatever you’d like to call them. But all these terms are going to fall away except for one, which is ISP. The only “network” anyone will subscribe to in the future will be the Internet, and the Internet and…
I’m a programmer and software architect by background, and a student of computing history. I’ve seen the transformation of computing from the retrospective analysis of “keypunched” paper records of retail transactions to highly interactive assistance with online, real-time, activity. Through that, computers have migrated from data center to desktop to smartphones in our hands, and…
While an old-time science fiction writer once said “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”, consumers of online services have been binging on free stuff from the first. Of course, “free” really means “ad sponsored”, and since everyone is used to ad sponsorship through TV commercials, applying the concept to online experiences doesn’t…
One of the hardest lessons we all have to learn in life is that you can’t go back to the past. I suspect everyone has had a personal lesson on that topic, but the same principle applies on a broader scale, to populations and economies. We need to learn it now. One of the things…
Is there any such thing as “cloud networking”? On one level that seems like a dumb question, but if you look deeper into it, you see that we have a whole range of vague and often contradictory definitions. That’s too bad, because it’s clear that the cloud is transforming computing and applications, and because the…
For this third and final blog in my “contextual services” series, I’ll look at the actual higher-level software requirements for the concept. Remember that my goal in the series is to frame a set of facilitating services or features that would be exposed via APIs and provide operators with a means of wholesaling capabilities to…
If, as I speculated yesterday, the optimum new-service strategy for network operators would be a set of facilitating services that exploited contextualization and personalization of mobile behavior, what would the technology requirements look like? Operators need to balance feature specificity to raise the value of their services to the OTTs who would frame them in…