Everyone has an opinion on what telcos need to be doing (including me). At an event like MWC 2021, it’s not surprising that that question has been raised, and it’s similarly unsurprising that IBM’s CEO has used the bully pulpit of a keynote session to offer IBM’s answer. IBM is one of the vendors telcos…
I’m always eager to look at anything on event-driven architectures, so the piece in New Stack caught my attention. It’s focused on “three myths” regarding EDA, and debunking them, but there are points along the way that relate to the value of event-driven models for telecom software. That should be a critical topic right now…
How big is IoT? Obviously, it’s one of the most hyped of all technologies, with heady estimates of spending rampant and all manner of vague business propositions to back those estimates up. It turns out that it’s very difficult to estimate just what IoT’s impact would be, for a variety of reasons. I’ve undertaken a…
Separating the control and user/data planes is a fixture of 5G, but it opens some questions. One is whether the implementation of the two is also separate, whether software and hardware are disaggregated or co-dependent, and another is what specific hardware platform(s) might be considered for each. Perhaps the most important is just what a…
Microsoft is arguably the leader in enterprise cloud computing, given that a big chunk of Amazon’s cloud business comes from startups and social-network players. Now, Microsoft wants to be the leader in carrier cloud too, or so it seems. There’s no question that Microsoft has the credentials for carrier cloud, technology-wise, and they also seem…
Here’s a bold statement for you: “There is no magic that an Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft could enable because the underlying software architecture is absolutely flawed. It needs to evolve.” This, from the CTO of Rakuten Mobile, as quoted in an SDxCentral piece. I agree, of course, and in fact I’ve been trying…
In our search for edge computing justifications, are we pushing the complexity of cloud and Internet hosting too far? Some recent developments suggest that we may be opening a new set of dependencies for applications, creating an availability challenge that cries out for some architectural solution to complex component relationships. A solution we don’t seem…
The Telecom Infrastructure Project (TIP) has done some interesting things, and one of the most recent and interesting of the bunch is their release of the Distributed Disaggregated Backbone Router (DDBR) requirements document. TIP has been a significant force in open-model network hardware, and so anything they do is important, and we need to take…
Suppose I want to develop a true cloud-native version of a network service or feature, maybe even an application? I’ve noted in past blogs that the term “cloud-native” is rapidly becoming the greatest “wash” in the industry; vendors, operators, analysts, reporters, and editors all spread it over anything related to the cloud. That’s a bad…
Is there a reason to have proprietary technology in the 5G RAN? Is virtualization and disaggregation a good idea, or are there real costs and risks? Ericsson was quoted in an SDxCentral piece that outlines the case for a balance between open and proprietary. I want to come down on the issue a bit differently….