Everything seems to be a trade-off, particularly with technology. Planners and CIOs are always balancing risk and reward, upside and downside. One place where that balancing act is especially important is in 5G, and especially 5G’s RAN, New Radio or NR. I’ve noticed that telco planners and some of the vendors engaged with them are…
You gotta love “transformation”; the term is hopeful, positive, even revolutionary, and at the same time it’s almost totally vague, which means you can say pretty much anything you want about it. One reason, as I suggested in a blog last week, was that IT planners and network planners are actually vague themselves on the…
IoT has been a cherished potential revenue opportunity for 5G for years, but there have been skeptics of the link for just as long—including me. The challenge for 5G IoT is that unless the service is free, people would have to pay to connect IoT devices. Service providers are OK with that (obviously) but consumers…
Why do we seem to have so many problems with IT and network security? We hear about a new attack almost every day, a new risk, a new set of cautions, and (of course) new products. You’d think that given the long history of bad actors in the space, something effective would have been done…
Why do I make so big a point about “box-centric” specifications for network virtualization? If somebody virtualizes a box, isn’t it the same thing as virtualizing everything that’s in it? In a blog last week, I looked at the 5G O-RAN specification and talked about some of my issues in abstraction of the functionality. I…
Why do enterprises think IoT is a key to transformation, but at the same time seem to be vague on the “Why?” Enterprises have been singing IoT transformation praises for over a year, and the same point has emerged in other analyst reports and surveys, but there’s rarely been a lot of detail offered in…
In a single day last week, I saw six news items that demonstrate the market, business, and technology challenge that’s posed by 5G. None of this tumult means that 5G isn’t going to happen, but it seems to me to demonstrate that we’re not yet really sure how it’s going to happen. The who-wins and…
5G specifications have addressed the growing interest in “alternative technologies” in networking, embracing things like NFV and (some say) SDN. What is less clear is how effective the initiatives will be in the real world. A lot will depend on how vendors interpret the specifications, and in particular how far we take the concept of…
I mentioned in yesterday’s blog that there was a profound difference between open-model network software based on the transactional or RESTful model, and software designed to be event-driven. I also said that the difference was critical in selecting the platform software tools to be used to support applications, particularly at the edge. What is the…
I promised recently that I’d post something on how operator planners viewed my “service plane” concept, as soon as I could get data. Over last week, I did some data gathering, and today I think I can keep my promise—sort of. The reason for the qualification is that what I’m calling the “service plane”, in…