Cloud providers like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have been tuning their strategies to conform to the evolution of the hybrid cloud model. Telcos have been trying to tune or transform their business model to wean themselves away from dependence on bill-for-bits services, all of which are commoditizing. Is it a surprise that the two groups…
Years ago, I was involved in early work on ISDN (remember that!). Since CIMI Corporation had signed the Cooperative R&D Agreement (CRDA) with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), I had a chance to review many of the early use cases. I remember in particular a day when a vendor technologist burst into…
Wall Street is always important, but not always insightful. Because the view of the Street on a company or strategy determines share price, which usually has a decisive impact on management policy, we have to follow it. But the Street has its own agenda, a desire for a revolution that can be played, so we…
One of the moving parts in lifecycle automation is scope, by which I mean the extent to which an action impacts the network or a service. It should be fundamental to our thinking about lifecycles and lifecycle automation, but it’s almost never discussed. We’re going to discuss it today. Imagine yourself driving down a long,…
What Cisco does is always news, even when it involves what’s usually a dull-as-dishwater theme like reorganization. Cisco gave surprisingly negative guidance in its most recent earnings call, and everyone is thinking that the reorg has more to do with that than gaining “economies of scale” or “aligning with the evolving needs of customers”. I…
Fierce Telecom did a nice piece on the Top 12 Telecom Disruptors of 2019, focusing on the vendor side of the industry. I’d like to propose that the top disruptor isn’t on the list, because rather than being a vendor, it’s an “anti-vendor”. The open-model network is, by the account of operators themselves, vendors, and…
What is common to all dreams? The answer is “dreamers”, and that’s what seems to be dominating the whole 5G, edge, and augmented reality space. Light Reading’s piece on the subject yesterday talks about how network giants Verizon and AT&T are “hoping” that 5G and edge computing will save augmented reality (AR). “Hoping” and “dreaming”…
When the real broadband wars started in the last decade, cable companies had a major advantage over the telcos. Cable infrastructure is based on CATV cable, which has a potential capacity of over 10 Gbps over a significant distance, while operators were stuck with twisted-pair DSL model that was taxed to deliver 25 Mbps over…
Talking with operators about OSS/BSS is interesting, and I’ve blogged about operator views on the topic before. The discussions, combined with my own long exposure to the topic, have also given me my own perspective, enriched by recent deep-dive discussions. This is my view of where we are in OSS/BSS modernization, and what might make…
Do we need another online tech news site? That’s an interesting question given the fact that the founder of Politico is about to announce another venture, Protocol, which is just that. The press release says that “Great media companies are sharply focused on communities and the ideas that bind them. POLITICO successfully captured the influential…