Some on Wall Street think Nokia is a disruptor in disguise, reinventing itself quietly to seize control of networking through 5G. I don’t agree with the article’s like that “5G is the Next Industrial Revolution” (hey, this is media, so do we expect hype or what?) but I do think that the article makes some…
Verizon thinks it’s out front in what it calls an enterprise “land grab” at the edge. Of course, everyone likes to say they’re in the lead of some race or another, and Verizon’s position in the edge is really set by a deal with Microsoft and Amazon. Does this mean that they’re just resellers and…
I’ve blogged a lot about the relationship between 5G and edge computing. In most of my blogs I’ve focused on the importance of coming up with a common software model, a kind of PaaS, that would allow 5G deployment to pull through infrastructure that would support generalized edge computing. Most of those who have chatted…
According to a Light Reading article on Open RAN, “The virtualized, modular RAN will be here sooner rather than later and vendors will be tripping over each other as they try to get on board.” I agree with that statement, and with much of the article too. That raises the question of just what the…
Cisco’s Investor Day was all about their growing position in the software space. Software grew from 20% of revenues in 2017 to 30% in 2021, which is certainly a validation of their claim of software growth. What’s far less clear is whether Cisco’s avowed shift to software is offensive or defensive, and whether it can…
Juniper’s decision to harmonize its implementation of the Open RAN RIC (Radio/RAN Intelligent Controller) with Intel’s FlexRAN program raises again a question I’ve asked in prior blogs, which is whether a network vendor who isn’t a mobile-network incumbent can play in 5G, and by extension whether they could play at the edge. I believe that…
Why are network, application, and data security problems so difficult to solve? As I’ve noted in previous blogs, many companies say they spend as much on security as on network equipment, and many also tell me that they don’t believe that they, or their vendors, really have a handle on the issue. “We’re adding layers…
Anyone who reads tech news or watches TV probably realizes that 5G smartphones are taking off. A part of the reason is that most of the major smartphone vendors make 5G a feature of their newest models, which makes 5G less a choice than something that a new phone pulls through. The question, of course,…
Wall Street has credible reasons to believe that O-RAN is going to end the dominance of the big mobile network equipment vendors, and it may re-jiggle the vendors’ ranking too. The bigger question is the impact it might have in the networking industry overall. It may be that there’s no success in networking in the…
In a move that I found both surprising and unsurprising at the same time, Comcast acquired Masergy Communications, a provider of managed SD-WAN and SASE. It’s surprising because network operators haven’t traditionally purchased either technology or managed service providers. It’s unsurprising both because these aren’t traditional times in networking, and because Comcast knows it has…