Why is it that the focus of 5G discussions is a space that’s relatively unimportant? Why are we largely ignoring the most promising piece of 5G? I’ve been talking to enterprises, operators, and vendors on 5G for months, and over the last month I’ve focused on this underrated piece—millimeter wave. Here’s what I found, and…
Why did ISDN, X.25, frame relay, SMDS, and ATM go wrong? These technologies all spawned their own forums and standards, got international media attention, and promised to be the foundation of a new model of infrastructure. Obviously, they didn’t do that. When we look at current technology hype around things like NFV or SDN or…
What might actually drive telcos to host 5G on public cloud services? That’s another issue that we’re starting to see some clarity on, as operators get the range on 2021 budgets and which of their tech plans might be fulfilled. Clarity doesn’t mean firm conviction, though, as we’ll see. Operators list three reasons for their…
There’s clearly a lot of movement in network equipment, both in technology and competitive areas. There have been some recent developments in the Open RAN space, and other network vendor announcements that suggest changes in 2021. This gives us an opportunity to examine how the trends I’ve talked about in the past are evolving through…
As 5G planning progresses, we’re getting more information from operators about how they’re seeing things like Open RAN, public-cloud 5G hosting, and new 5G-dependent services. Things are still very preliminary, but one thing that’s already clear is that the high cost of 5G licenses (as reflected in recent auctions) are raising the risk level for…
Are we heading toward a union of network and IT concepts, vendors, and even infrastructure? Over the last two decades, companies have slowly pulled networking and IT into a common organization, and today the “software-defined” technologies seem to be uniting the two spaces for service providers and the cloud players. Is this trend real, is…
If a tree falls in the woods…. We’ve all heard that old saying, and many remember debating it in their youth. Now, it seems, the story is skirting the edge of becoming a paradigm, and we even have a name for it, observability. Since I blogged yesterday on the risks of tech-hype, is this another…
Like most years past, we’re entering 2021 with a healthy population of exaggerations regarding tech issues. Since, as I’ve said many times, “news” means “novelty” not “truth”, I guess that’s inevitable. The problem is that 2021 is going to be a pivotal year for tech overall. We’re recovering from a pandemic-generated economic slump, we’re facing…
What is the biggest challenge in tech? This happens to be a question that unites the service providers and enterprises, the network and the data center and cloud. According to the people I’ve chatted with over the last quarter of 2020, the answer is complexity. Both groups say that their need to address complexity grows…
Is there one good definition for disaggregation, in the context of networking? I’ve said in a number of my blogs that “commercial disaggregation”, the separation of software and hardware so you can charge an annual license fee for the latter, isn’t disaggregation. I’ve also suggested that just having software and hardware separated so you can…