Our taste for broadband is changing, or to be more precise, our taste for what we use it for is changing. This is particularly true when you broaden the topic to our consumption of “wireline” services. Things like channelized TV, once the mainstay of wireline services, are being dropped by customers. Operators are looking at…
Any sort of lifecycle automation demands the generation of responses to conditions. The industry has defined two broad approaches to that, the use of policies and the use of state/event logic. Both these concepts have been around for (literally) half a century, so there’s plenty of experience with them. There seems to be less experience…
If the biggest problem in information technology is complexity, could the biggest question be whether artificial intelligence in some form is the solution? We may have to answer that question as soon as this year, partly because the evolution of IT is bringing us to a critical point, and partly because the pandemic has raised…
Can we know anything about open source in a pandemic world? IBM is the first big tech name to report earnings since the virus struck, and with the acquisition of Red Hat, they’re also the giant in the open-source enterprise software space. Do they offer us any clues about the way that the open-source software…
Our unhappy pandemic is fading…slowly…for now. It’s not clear when and how things will be opened up again, but it seems likely that will be starting within a month in the US. Other countries have already started opening up. The impact of the pandemic is historic, but we won’t know all of the details, likely,…
Frontier Communications has filed for Chapter 11, which isn’t a huge surprise to most of us who’ve followed the fortunes of the company from the first. Following hasn’t been easy, because Frontier is a hodgepodge of smaller phone companies, has gone through a number of name changes, and has explored a number of different business…
In yesterday’s blog, I looked at the operations considerations that arise when you build a “network” by hosting feature/function instances on infrastructure. I pointed out that the process creates two explicit layers—“functional” and “infrastructure”—and one implicit one, the layer representing the binding between the two that actually creates the service. We explored the operations impact…
One operator offered an interesting view of hosted-function networking: “In some ways I hope it’s different from devices, and in others I hope it isn’t.” The “I-hope-it-is” position is based on the economic driver for using hosted virtual functions; it would be cheaper than proprietary appliances. The “I-hope-it-isn’t” position relates to the fear that the…
Well, we have another new-IP story emerging, one that includes both some of our old familiar themes and some new-ish ones. The questions are first, whether any of the suggestions make sense, and second, whether they could be implemented if they did. I think there may even be a better way to achieve the same…
Ever see a couple at dinner, each on their phone and ignoring the other? It’s easy to dismiss this behavior, but in fact it’s a sign of the times. Social behavior is an arbitrary set of standards that govern interactions, and if you open a new medium for that interaction, you can enable a new…