Services based on physical connectivity, like IP services today, seem to be hitting a profit wall. As I’ve pointed out in other blogs, we’re seeing operators under pressure to cut costs because customer willingness to pay for more bandwidth isn’t particularly high. There are surveys that suggest that plenty of users would like 100Mbps, or…
There is a tide, they say, and that’s true for many things, technology included. It’s been almost five years since I first said that there was more to be gained from operations automation than by capex reduction via things like NFV. That was true then, and still true even just a couple years ago. It’s…
Recently, my blogs on carrier cloud have focused on the question of whether a trend among operators toward outsourcing public cloud services to a cloud provider will impact carrier cloud. A related question, raised in this Light Reading piece, is whether it could also impact edge computing. An element of that question is whether edge…
Telefonica has joined Vodafone in picking a cloud partner for enterprise services, rather than fielding its own carrier cloud. Neither Telefonica nor Vodafone picked the top provider—Amazon—and neither picked runner-up and hybrid cloud leader Microsoft either. Telefonica selected Google and Vodafone selected IBM. What does all this mean for operators, for carrier cloud, and for…
With the media asking whether it would really be so bad for operators if 5G were slipped, and whether perhaps the whole idea of accelerating 5G was worthwhile, Cisco is telling the world they’re the most important 5G vendor because they can help operators monetize 5G. I think all these stories are connected, and that…
We now have a pretty good idea what SD-WAN looks like, at least in its basic form. We can infer, from things like the MEF draft SD-WAN standard, what some SD-WAN future developments might be. What we really need to do is explore the future of SD-WAN in a more formalized way. SD-WAN, as I’ve…
We all know that in a market that’s commoditizing as networking seems to be, it’s common to see “horizontal aggregation” of players, where competitors bulk up to improve efficiency as market profit margins decline. We now seem to be entering an era of “vertical aggregation”, where companies buy not competitors but rather symbiotic players in…
Everyone has surely heard about Google’s massive outage, even those who weren’t directly impacted by it. The fact that “network congestion” could take down such a broad set of services—some essential to their users—is troubling, and it should be. The details of the cause will probably eventually come out, but it appears the issues were…
5G is surely a popular topic for media and bloggers, in no small part because it’s seen as the salvation of both service providers and the vendors who sell to them. A recent article in Fierce Telecom raises some good points on just who might benefit from 5G, points that deserve a close examination based…
There are a lot of moving parts to cloud-native, some of which (like state control) I’ve already blogged on, and some of which have received considerable attention in the media overall. If you look at the big picture, you find the strategies for achieving cloud-native behavior fall into two groups. One is the software design…