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…
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…