Where is the best place to host computing power? Answer: Where it’s needed. Where’s the most economical place? Answer: Probably not where it’s needed. The dilemma of the cloud, then, is how to balance optimality in QoE and the business case. I’m going to propose that this dilemma changes the nature of the cloud, and…
Do you think that core routing is just for big routers? Think again. DriveNets, a startup who developed a “Network Cloud” cloud-routing solution and AT&T co-announced (HERE and HERE) that DriveNets “is providing the software-based core routing solution for AT&T, the largest backbone in the US.” That could fairly be called a blockbuster announcement (covered…
NFV has seen a lot of movement recently, but all movement isn’t progress. I noted in earlier blogs that NFV still shows up in a lot of telco diagrams on implementation of 5G, including OpenRAN, and it’s also included in vendor diagrams of their support for telco cloud, even cloud-native. The problem is that NFV…
How much can open source do for 5G? That’s a question a lot of operators are asking (and a lot of vendors, too). The ONF, who is taking a much bigger/broader role these days, thinks they have some answers, so it’s well worth looking at them. This (topically speaking) a kind of follow-on to my…
Industry events are good, providing you can time-shift to watch them. That’s particularly true for analysts, because drinking bathwater is not an attractive image, whether it’s your own or not. The term could be said to apply to any number of things that create a kind of intellectual recycling, a belief set that builds on…
Differentiation has always been a challenge, but it seems like the problems vendors and providers face in standing out from the masses is getting worse. Part of that is because there are more and more areas that could offer differentiation, more difficulties making buyers understand the issues in those areas, and more overlap across the…
If latency is important, just what constitutes “good” and “bad” latency levels? How does latency figure into network and application design, and what are the sources of latency that we can best control? I’ve talked about latency before, but over the last couple months I’ve been collecting information on latency that should let me get…
The NFV community accepts the need to modernize, but it’s more difficult for them to say what “modern” looks like. Certainly there’s pressure for change, but the pressure seems as much about tuning terminology as actually changing technology. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the area of “cloud-native”. Virtual Network Functions (VNFs), the meat…
Why do so many vendors mess up acquisitions? It’s always been a relevant question because, well, vendors always seem to mess them up. It’s relevant now because of the Ericsson announcement it was acquiring Cradlepoint, and that deal could be a poster child for a number of the issues I’m going to raise. There are…
Why are operators interested in event-driven OSS/BSS? Maybe I should qualify that as “some operators” or even “some people in some operators”. In the last ten days, I’ve heard (for the second time) a sharp dispute within an operator regarding the future of OSS/BSS. I’ve also heard vendors and analysts wonder what’s really on. Here’s…