The easiest way to kill a new product or service is to price it wrong. Buyers always compare new stuff with older stuff, and accept a higher price only if they see a clear incremental benefit. Sellers always want to recover incremental costs with price increases. This challenge is now coming to the fore in … Continue reading 5G Pricing, Progress, and Missions
We may be seeing some clarity in the edge space, arising perhaps surprisingly from some increased confusion. There are more players emerging, more theories promulgating, and more value propositions being tested, to be sure. What’s interesting is that some trends are emerging. The biggest question in edge computing is just who has the edge, so … Continue reading New Battle Lines Emerge at the Edge
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 … Continue reading Changing Broadband Tastes and the Digital Divide
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 … Continue reading Learning a Lesson from Frontier
I blogged yesterday about the general impact scenarios for COVID-19. Today I want to look at some more network-specific points, in particular the general impact on network capacity and the capex response and the impact on 5G planning. It’s easy to say that network operators, faced with significant traffic growth, will respond with massive capital … Continue reading A Deeper Dive into COVID-19s Impact on Networking
Barron’s ran an interesting interview with ATT heir-apparent John Stankey, now CEO of WarnerMedia, and it offers some views on how streaming and 5G might transform the telco space. I think these same factors will influence the direction of cable companies, and of course will then pull through influence on the vendor space. We have … Continue reading Can AT&T Navigate its New Content-Centric Path?
What happens if the food chain breaks? Anyone who’s studied biology knows that life is a complex ecosystem arranged in a kind of pyramid, where the stuff at the bottom is eaten by the next layer up, and so forth. Disruptions in the food chain lead to imbalances in the ecosystem; look at the relationship … Continue reading Connecting the Telecom Food Chain
Every network operator worldwide faces profit challenges. Some face challenges more acute than others, of course, and we need to watch those operators to get an advance look at what may be coming for the industry overall. AT&T is such an operator. They have a challenging demand density, they made some mistakes in their early … Continue reading Fixing AT&T’s Problems: Possible?
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” … Continue reading Would 5G and Edge Computing Really Launch AR?
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 … Continue reading 5G Fixed Wireless and the Telco/Cableco Wars