Suppose the pandemic is transformational? That’s a question that more and more planners/strategists are asking, among service providers, vendors, and enterprises. There are several dimensions of transformation, obviously, but the one that I propose to look at is the technology dimension. Will the pandemic really change how technology is used, and therefore how it’s purchased? …
Even based on early numbers from network vendors, it’s clear that network operators are at least slow-rolling, and likely constraining, capital spending. While it’s easy to blame the pandemic, network usage for most consumers and businesses has increased since the lockdowns began. It’s obvious that operators don’t make incremental money on traffic absent usage pricing,…
The problem with 5G is overreach. We start off with a network technology that, realistically speaking, has a 100% probability of deployment. We then try to gild the lily, insisting that every 3GPP feature be deployed, and that everything we do with 5G be something new, never done before, never possible. We want the rollout…
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…