Is an open 5G infrastructure model really possible? Many (and, of course, most of the 5G vendors) have said it’s not. There are providers of pieces of the 5G software in open-source form, but one area that’s been particularly challenging has been the 5G New Radio (NR). Now, just perhaps, it might be possible, thanks…
The easiest way to kill a new product or service is to price it wrong. Buyers always compare new stuff with older stuff, and accept a higher price only if they see a clear incremental benefit. Sellers always want to recover incremental costs with price increases. This challenge is now coming to the fore in…
Does lower latency automatically improve transaction processing? That may sound like a kind-of-esoteric question, but the answer may determine just how far edge computing can go. It could also help to understand what network-infrastructure applications like 5G would mean to mobile edge computing (MEC) and even what kind of edge-computing stimulus we might expect to…
We could paraphrase an old song to promote a new network strategy. “Just wrap your opex in bandwidth, and photon your opex away.” From the first, a lot of network design has focused on aggregating traffic to promote economies of scale in transport. That has translated into equipment and into protocol features. Many (including me)…
Cisco had a disappointing quarter, and there’s no getting around it. The question then is whether Cisco can “get around it” in future quarters, and the situation in that regard is really complicated. It’s going to depend on just how radical Cisco is willing to be in facing the future. Networking had a golden age,…
A lot of our tech advances are about carts and horses, chickens and eggs. In other words, they represent examples of co-dependency. 5G is perhaps the leading example of this, but you can make the same statement about carrier cloud and perhaps even IoT. The common issue with these things is that there’s an application…
When will this all be over? That’s the question that’s on everyone’s mind in these pandemic days. There are really two answers, of course. One relates to how long it will be before human interactions won’t be significantly hampered by the virus, and the other relates to how long it will be before behaviors return…
There are layers of the clouds in the sky. Similarly, for a bunch of reasons, there are (or should be) layers in the cloud applications and infrastructure that companies are adopting or planning. Yes, there are some applications and even some businesses that may view both cloud and data center as a single resource, or…
Microsoft has decided to go its own way on service mesh, or at least to try. Given that Istio, a Google development but still open-source, is the de facto standard in service mesh, why would Microsoft make that decision? Would a service mesh battle help the cloud-native space? Is there a carrier cloud dimension to…
How useful would artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) really be in network lifecycle automation? The topic gets a lot of attention, and a lot of vendors have made claims about it, but the real benefits are actually difficult to assess. Part of the reason is that there are many ways AI/ML could be applied,…