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…
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…