Sometimes the real story in something is deeper than the apparent news. Nobody should be surprised by the decision by AT&T to suspend any new DSL broadband connections. This is surely proof that DSL is dead, even for the skeptics, but DSL isn’t the real issue. The real issue is what’s behind the AT&T decision,…
The news that IBM will spin off its managed infrastructure services business into a new company created a pop for its stock, but what does this mean (if anything) for the IT market? In particular, what does it mean for cloud computing? It’s not as simple as it might seem. The basic coverage theme for…
I know I talk a lot about “demand density” in my blogs, so much that you could think I’m saying it’s the essential underpinning of network evolution. Well, it kind of is. The future of networking is written in dollars, not in bits, and demand density is the fundamental dollar reality. I’ve been working through…
Vendors are finally discovering the virtue of opex reduction. Cisco has included the network sector in its overall AI/ML strategy, complementing “intent-based networks”. Juniper’s Mist AI deal, combined with their recent acquisition of Netrounds, shows that they’re looking at more ways to apply automation, testing, monitoring, and other stuff that qualifies as operations automation. The…
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…