Every day, I see and hear about new data points that suggest we’re getting the whole hybrid- and multi-cloud story all wrong. It’s a given that stories about the cloud are all about hybrid and multi-cloud deployments, but they’re sparse on just what the terms mean, and that means they’re not particularly useful in guiding…
Assessing Nokia’s Cloud-Provider Alliances
Nokia, who seems to have struggled a bit more with 5G than rival Ericsson, may be taking the “open” way out, and it might also turn out to be the “easy” way. As TelecomTV reports HERE, Nokia has established an Open RAN development relationship with all three of the public cloud giants. You’ll recall that…
Has AT&T Won a Race to the Wrong Finish?
AT&T has been the arguable champion of transformed infrastructure, a major contributor to open networking projects and an adopter of open technology from cellular edge to core, as well as open operations automation and orchestration. The company has announced it would be virtualizing its network, and has recently said it’s met the majority of those…
The Future of the Service Mesh in Telecom Applications
Are service meshes perfect for telecom? Some articles have suggested they are, or at least are essential. I’ve also heard from telecom users who stop just short of saying that service meshes are the death of telecom applications. It’s useful to see why there’s such a divergence in viewpoint, and also to see whether there’s…
The Hypothetical Edge is the Big Driver of the Real Cloud
If it happens at all, edge computing just might become more important than cloud. Not so much because there would be a ton of stuff hosted there, because the majority of application code won’t be. Not because of explosive growth in things like self-driving cars, because they won’t contribute much to the edge for years./…
Do Spectrum Prices Threaten Telcos?
Is the high price of 5G spectrum hurting telcos? AT&T has been under particular pressure from the financial industry on the point, but claims to be confident in their finances. There are a lot of moving parts involved in deciding whether spectrum costs are a risk, and the answer may be critical to the long-term…
Why Networking Needs to Catch Software Operations Fever
Remember when we used to talk things over? I’m not talking about relationships, but about faults and problems. Have we, as an industry, gotten too focused on real-time analysis and forgotten “retrospection?” There’s an interesting article on this, as it relates to software operations, that we could think about applying to networking. Note that the…
Making Virtual and Augmented Reality Real
How could we use augmented reality and what would that use require from the technology itself? AR is perhaps a key in unlocking a whole new way of empowering workers and engaging consumers, but like other new technology arrivals, there seems to be a complex ecosystem needed, and it’s not entirely clear how we’ll get…
Would an Architecture to Promote Vertical Services Help 5G?
Just what is needed to broaden the potential revenue base for 5G. One idea that’s been gaining in credibility is a vertical-market focus. Both Google and IBM have taken vertical steps recently, and now we have an interesting article on the architecture of a vertical exploitation of 5G. You all know I’m a big, unashamed,…
Should Managed Network Services Take a Cloud Lesson?
Kubernetes has been almost as revolutionary as containers, and almost synonymous with that concept too. As great as Kubernetes is, though, it’s often seen as a complexity black hole, and its complexity is surely both a barrier to its adoption and a barrier to cloud-native development. Google doesn’t like that, largely because cloud-native support is…