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…
Everything old is new again, so they say, and that’s even more likely to be true when “new” means little more than “publicized”. When I talked to the 177 enterprises I’ve chatted with this year, I was somewhat surprised to find that well over two-thirds believed that artificial intelligence was “new”, meaning that it emerged…
Remember “shadow IT?” Even the name seems a little sinister, and for many CIOs it was a threat from the get-go. What shadow IT is all about is the dispersal of information technology purchasing and control to line organizations, creating a parallel set of technology centers. We don’t hear as much about it these days,…
If there’s a vendor in the networking space that we need to watch closely, it’s Cisco. Not only are they a giant, and a master at account control, they’re also the most inventive when it comes to addressing (or creating, or some might say, fabricating) future trends. Their latest earnings report adds some color, perhaps,…
The value of MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) services for wireline incumbents has always been a question mark, given that many cable operators who tried the notion out didn’t get what they’d hoped for. Still, as this Light Reading piece says, there have also been MVNO success stories among at least some of the larger…
What the heck is going on with fiber to the home? There seem to be a lot of announcements about new fiber deployments. Isn’t there a problem with fiber deployment costs in many areas? Are we headed to universal fiber broadband after all? The answers to these questions relate to the collision between demand and…
OK, if telecom innovation is dead, as both the Financial Times and my recent blog agreed it was, what would “innovation” have to look like to restore things? Can public cloud providers play a role in helping telcos innovate, or would the reliance on them just create another form of “disintermediation”? Let’s look at these…
Why has a Financial Times article suggested that “Telecoms innovation talk may be nothing but hot air?” It’s probably more important to wonder if it’s true, of course. Many pundits (myself included) have talked about this issue before, and even some telecom executives have offered their own views. I recently recovered a hoard of my…
The SD-WAN space has been percolating for years, and there are some recent signs that it may finally be sticking its head out beyond the old extend-the-VPN-to-small-sites mission. One thing that seems to stand out in two announcements is a managed services connection. As always, though, there’s no shortage of competitive intrigue in the mix,…