The separation between control and data planes is a pretty-well-accepted concept, but one complicating factor in the picture is that the term “control plane” isn’t used consistently. Originally, the “control plane” was the set of protocol messages used to control data exchanges, and so it was (as an example) a reference to the in-band exchanges…
Vendors love to rain on open initiatives, so it’s not surprising that Ericsson, perhaps the leading 5G vendor, is now casting clouds and shade on Open RAN. Specifically, they’re warning about the security risks it might present. Is this yet another of those cynical vendor ploys, or is there something to the issue? In particular,…
The biggest players in a space always set the tone, but they don’t always tell the story. Oracle last week turned in a good quarter, and they’re in many ways an outlier in the public cloud space. They don’t figure in most media cloud discussions as they rank number five in most public cloud reports,…
Ciena beat its estimates in both EPS and revenue, which raises the question of whether operators are moving more to a “capacity-biased” model of network architecture even without a complete picture of how such a model could be optimized, or how it could contribute to improved profits in the long run. An interesting jumping-off point…
VMware came out with an announcement of their 5G Telco Cloud Platform, the latest step in the developing battle for all those carrier cloud applications. Their press release is a bit difficult to decode, but it’s worth taking the effort because the company is presenting what’s perhaps the last chance of network operators to take…
The service providers themselves may be giving carrier cloud its death blow, not tactically but strategically. In the last two months, operators worldwide have been shifting their thinking and planning decisively away from large-scale data center deployments. Carrier cloud deployments, which my model said could have generated a hundred thousand new data centers by 2030,…
Does a true virtual network infrastructure promote new services? To make the question easier, can it promote new services better than traditional infrastructure? You hear that claim all the time, but the frequency with which a given statement is made doesn’t relate to its truth these days. Rather than try to synthesize the truth by…
If you ever wondered why there were so many songs about rainbows, you might be among those who wonder why Tom Nolle talks so much about architectures. Somebody actually raised that point for me in a joking way, but it occurred to me that not everyone shares my own background and biases, the factors that…
What happens when a price leader cannot lead, or maybe even follow? In the world of carrier networking, we may be about to find out. Whatever you think about the war between the US Government and Huawei, the impact on Huawei seems to be increasing, and that could have a major impact on telecom, not…
If containers and Kubernetes are the way of the future (which I think they are), then future network models will have to support containers and Kubernetes. Obviously, the combination expects to have IP networking available, but there are multiple options for providing that. One is to deploy “real” IP in the form of an IP…