Is ATT right about fiber? The CFO says it’s a “three for one” revenue opportunity, which is why the operator says they’re likely to add to their fiber inventory. One clear message you can draw from that is that a one-for-one or two-for-one might not have been enough, which leads us I think to the…
The news for Open RAN just keeps getting better, but we all know that news is an imperfect reflection of market reality. There is indeed a lot of good news and important stuff, but there’s also some major questions being raised by operators, and implied by the very “good news” we’re happy about. Operators are…
What do users and providers think about SASE? Besides, perhaps, that they hate acronyms and the constant creation of “new categories” for the famous quadrant charts? I usually try to get a feeling for this sort of question at the end of the year, because even where there’s no formal tech planning cycle at year’s…
Operators usually do a tech planning cycle that runs from about mid-September to mid-November. The ones I’ve been tracking (about 50) are now done with their cycles, so this is a perfect time to look at what operators think they need to be doing, and facing, in 2021. Tech planning and budget planning, I must…
What is going to happen with information technology? There are a lot of people who wonder about that, who have a significant stake in the answer to that question. There are a lot of answers, too, most of which are simply guesses. Well, there’s no way to make a forecast without an element of judgment,…
One of the factors that limits software portability is custom hardware. While most servers are based on standard CPU chips, the move toward GPU and FPGA acceleration in servers, and toward custom silicon in various forms for white-box switching, means that custom chip diversity is already limiting hardware portability. The solution, at least in some…
Probably the only election topic most agree on is polling. For two presidential elections in a row, we’ve had major failures of polls to predict outcomes, so it’s no surprise that people are disenchanted with the process. What’s more surprising is that many people don’t realize that all surveys are as inherently flawed as polling…
If ever there was a clear picture of open 5G challenge, THIS Light Reading piece may provide it. The chart the article offers shows the things that Dish had to integrate in order to build an open-model 5G network. It doesn’t look like a lot of fun, and there’s been a fair amount of industry…
What can we learn from 3Q20 earnings? Company reports on revenue and earnings often provide us with important information about the real market trends, not the hype trends we so often read about. There were high hopes for this quarter from many companies, but did they pan out? What can we read from the results…
Why do automation projects, meaning lifecycle automation projects, fail? A long-time LinkedIn contact of mine, Stefan Walraven did a nice video on the topic, something worth discussing not only in the context of lifecycle automation, a big interest of mine, but also in the context of any “transformational” projects, including virtualization, disaggregation, white boxes, and…