Are operators really at a crossroads? They’ve suffered through continuous profit-per-bit pressure on traditional network services for over a decade. Improving that means enhancing revenue per bit, reducing cost per bit, or maybe both, and the choice operators make will have a major impact on the revenues vendors can expect, and which vendors can expect…
One thing that I think the last couple weeks have made clear is that, while there’s a clear business relationship between 5G hosting and multi-access edge computing (MEC), the technical relationship has been difficult to pin down. One reason is that most of 5G hosting discussions have centered on 5G RAN, and the open O-RAN…
Everyone loves metro and the edge these days, it seems, and the last couple of weeks have proved that. Juniper did a big thing on their Cloud Metro strategy (see my blog) and Ciena just launched a whole campaign based on “Next-Gen Metro & Edge”, and IBM did a keynote at MWC on its telco-centric…
How will shifts in technology, and new government programs, impact consumer broadband? We’re getting some hints on what the US infrastructure bill could do, and we’re also seeing competitive and technology shifts in commercial consumer broadband. There could be some major changes in the works, but through it all is the thread of a core…
Everyone has an opinion on what telcos need to be doing (including me). At an event like MWC 2021, it’s not surprising that that question has been raised, and it’s similarly unsurprising that IBM’s CEO has used the bully pulpit of a keynote session to offer IBM’s answer. IBM is one of the vendors telcos…
I’m always eager to look at anything on event-driven architectures, so the piece in New Stack caught my attention. It’s focused on “three myths” regarding EDA, and debunking them, but there are points along the way that relate to the value of event-driven models for telecom software. That should be a critical topic right now…
How big is IoT? Obviously, it’s one of the most hyped of all technologies, with heady estimates of spending rampant and all manner of vague business propositions to back those estimates up. It turns out that it’s very difficult to estimate just what IoT’s impact would be, for a variety of reasons. I’ve undertaken a…
Separating the control and user/data planes is a fixture of 5G, but it opens some questions. One is whether the implementation of the two is also separate, whether software and hardware are disaggregated or co-dependent, and another is what specific hardware platform(s) might be considered for each. Perhaps the most important is just what a…
Microsoft is arguably the leader in enterprise cloud computing, given that a big chunk of Amazon’s cloud business comes from startups and social-network players. Now, Microsoft wants to be the leader in carrier cloud too, or so it seems. There’s no question that Microsoft has the credentials for carrier cloud, technology-wise, and they also seem…
Here’s a bold statement for you: “There is no magic that an Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft could enable because the underlying software architecture is absolutely flawed. It needs to evolve.” This, from the CTO of Rakuten Mobile, as quoted in an SDxCentral piece. I agree, of course, and in fact I’ve been trying…