Verizon seems to be recognizing that the path to 5G success isn’t fantasy services, but the symbiosis between 5G, mobile services, and home broadband. It’s hard to overstate the importance of that, not only for Verizon but also for 5G and the networking industry. Of course, that fact that even a giant Tier One can…
The US may get funding from a proposed infrastructure package to “close the digital divide”. While this could be a boon for areas that lack good broadband services, these sorts of initiatives have been tried before, and some technologies have failed. Others may improve broadband based on current definitions of “good” quality, but have little…
Open-source technology is making headway in networking despite some very visible failures. In many respects, that’s good news, but the way the success is evolving may point to some challenges for the industry down the line. The biggest challenge it faces is its relationship with traditional network standards and industry group activity, and the second-biggest…
According to Light Reading, 6G is getting messy. Well, 5G is messy too, and I think it’s time to accept a revolutionary point, which is that we’ve passed the point where the traditional international standards processes like the 3GPP work. We need to think differently, totally differently, in considering how to evolve networks and services….
What happens when this is over, when all the noticeable impacts of COVID have gone? It’s surely a heady prospect for most of us personally, but what might it mean tech markets? How many things did COVID promote that will now be “un-promoted”, and how many suppressed things will now expand? A lot of companies…
I’ve done a few recent blogs on telco risks. It’s now time to talk about what they can do about them. I think most people in the industry, including most telcos, would agree that the future for network operators has to be different somehow, but how? And no, I don’t mean that all they need…
How much change in software is required for “digital transformation?” Do you need to redo everything to cloud-native form? There’s a school of thought, now represented by at least one startup, that thinks there’s a better way. According to Venture Beat, Camunda raised a hundred million dollars for cloud-native process automation software, and their approach…
If the telcos are under threat for basic services, from multiple sources, can they hope to gain new revenue at the edge? Telcos are surely potential edge players, but not the only ones, as Light Reading suggests HERE. Will there be competition for edge computing deployment, will telcos end up losing out to other more…
The attack on MPLS VPNs seems to be expanding. SD-WAN, originally conceptualized as an extension strategy for small sites, has been quietly growing more toward MPLS replacement. Now we have a new offering that combines SD-WAN with a backbone network to create an MPLS replacement. In fact, this is the second such offering that I’m…
The biggest future threat to network operators may be a present threat. Microsoft’s decision to offer Azure customers the option to have their entry and exit traffic carried on Microsoft’s own network rather than on the Internet is a signal that cloud providers may be flexing their own muscle in network services, as telcos stick…