The deal between AT&T and Time Warner hasn’t yet to be approved but it seems pretty likely to happen. In any event, just the attempt is big news for the industry. Many see this as a new age for media companies, but there are many questions of whether a conglomerate like this is the answer … Continue reading Will the AT&T/TW Deal Offer Operators Another Pathway to Profit?
When I blogged about the Google federated layers model I had a request from a LinkedIn contact to blog about applying the approach to NFV. I said I’d blog more on the topic next week, but it’s important enough to slot in for today. It is indeed possible to view NFV’s coordinated orchestration or decomposition … Continue reading Applying Google’s Service Orchestration Lessons to NFV
Transformation of a trillion-dollar infrastructure base isn’t going to be easy, and that’s what network operators are facing. Some don’t think it’s even possible, and a Light Reading story outlines Telecom Italia’s thinking on the matter. We seem to be hearing other viewpoints from other operators, so what’s really going on here? There’s always been … Continue reading Divergence of Operator Visions of NFV Show Inadequacies in Our Approach
Everyone by now knows that Ericsson has issued a profit warning, and that many analysts and reporters are wondering whether Ericsson can survive in the long term. I think it’s premature to call Ericsson a member of the walking dead, or even seriously wounded, but I also think that it might be helpful to look … Continue reading Ericsson’s Challenge: How They Got it Wrong, and How They’ll Need to Fix It
Google has now followed Amazon and Microsoft (Azure) in deploying cloud tools for IoT. In many ways, the Google announcement is a disappointment to me, because it doubles down on the fundamental mistake of thinking “IoT” is just about getting “things” on the “Internet.” But if you look at the trend in what I call … Continue reading Google Enters the Cloud IoT Space–Tentatively
The network operator technology planning cycle that typically happens annually between mid-September and mid-November is just getting underway, and I want to share some of the “talking points” operators have told me about. None of these positions are firm this early, but in past years a decent number of the early positions were solidified into … Continue reading A Read on Operator Priorities for the Fall Planning Cycle
Many vendors have found hope in NFV opportunity, including network vendors, software vendors, server vendors, and chip vendors. At VMworld the CEOs of Dell and VMware held a kind of NFV love-fest, and Intel has long been promoting NFV for the obvious reason that hosting anything consumes hosts, which consume chips. At the same time … Continue reading Can NFV Rise Above vCPE to Reach For the Carrier Cloud?
I blogged yesterday about the economics-driven transformation of networking from the data center out. My point was that as operators drive toward greater profits, they first concentrate on higher-layer content and cloud-hosted services, then concentrate these service assets in the metro areas, near the edge. This creates a kind of metro-virtual-data-center structure that users connect … Continue reading Networking the Fog
Despite all the hype around Google Fiber, the fact is that getting fiber to the premises (FTTP) is a major economic challenge. While everyone wants fast Internet, nobody really wants to pay for it, and with the Internet (unlike, say, the auto industry) there’s a deep-seated public perception that somehow what they want should be … Continue reading Is There a Practical Pathway to Fiber-to-the-Premises?
The news that Google has joined the CORD (“Central Office Re-Architected as a Data Center”) project, and that the project is now independent under the Linux foundation, is good news for next-gen networks. I’ve always thought CORD was important because it describes what operators would face in an infrastructure transformation—a massive shift in data center … Continue reading The New Vision, and Players, of CORD Could Change the Transformation Game