What have we learned so far from earnings season? It’s always hard to interpret these quarterly events, particularly since they’re at least as much a hype-Wall-Street exercise as a report on the company’s activities. Still, you can often interpret some interesting things, particularly if you look at multiple players in the same space. AT&T and … Continue reading Two Lessons from “Earnings Pairings”
Just when you express hope that the network industry can shed the past, somebody demonstrates it won’t be easy. An interview in Light Reading with Amdocs CTO Anthony Goonetilleke proposes that one of the unsung benefits of 5G is that it will enable operators to charge for services rather than for data. Is this really … Continue reading Will 5G Really Open New Revenue Opportunities?
Sometimes the new things you learn are things you should have known all along. That was the case last week with two critical announcements. First, Ericsson (a major 5G advocate) came out and told operators they wouldn’t be getting a big revenue windfall from cellular connection of IoT devices. Second, Amazon (who had no real … Continue reading The Industry Accepts Two Truths…Belatedly
We are now approaching a new year and a new budgetary cycle for just about everyone. That makes it a good time to look ahead, and I want to start that now by looking at three examples of important future trends. I’ll use a specific company/product to highlight each trend. The first trend is the … Continue reading Three Issues Leading to 2019
There is a lot of 5G that is real. There is a lot that is almost surely a pipe dream, and there’s some in between. Network slicing is one of the latter. The assumption for network slicing is that a 5G network can be divided into separate, parallel, virtual slices that act as independent networks. … Continue reading Does Nokia’s Wireline Slicing Change the Game?
Sprint is yet another operator to announce an IoT platform, but we still don’t have a real handle on what a really useful IoT platform would look like. So far, perhaps not surprisingly, what’s coming out focuses on what the operator does in the RAN to support IoT sensors. Is that all there is, or … Continue reading Are Carriers Still Missing the Point on IoT?
Sometimes in business you make big, tough, bets. Sometimes they turn out well, and of course there are those other times. Right now, we have two players in networking making those big bets, one vendor (VMware) and one operator (AT&T). Right now, they’re looking a bit sketchy but still just possibly viable, if they players … Continue reading Two Bets that May Shape Our Marketplace
Everyone probably agrees that broadband Internet is the revolution of our time. Whether we’re talking about wireline or wireless, even business versus consumer, the explosive growth of broadband access to the Internet has transformed much of telecom. What we used to think of as the prime services (voice calling) is now an afterthought OTT service. … Continue reading Facing a Broadband Future
Since we are pretty much done with 5G standards, it’s a good time to take a realistic look at the way 5G might actually deploy and how it might impact metro infrastructure and the carrier cloud. I want to stress that operators are internally divided on 5G and its impacts, so I’ve necessarily had to … Continue reading 5G as a Driver for Modernizing Infrastructure
There is always a risk in using buzzwords or catch-phrases. They tend to propagate through the market, losing contact with reality along the way. We hear, for example, that operators are “bullish” on transformation but don’t follow through. Is that a fair comment or is there something deeper going on. Four global operators have recently … Continue reading Some Truths About the Challenge of Operator Transformation