Introduction: As noted in an earlier blog post, the 9th annual Telecom Council Carrier Connections (TC3) Summit was held Sept 29th and 30th, 2016 in Mt View, CA.  A second TC3 article on 5G regulation is here. In his opening remarks, Telecom Council Chairman Derek Kerton stated that telcos have turned to start ups for innovation, rather… Read more →

By Cliff Grossner, Ph.D., senior research director, data center, cloud and SDN, IHS Markit Bottom Line Data center network equipment global revenue—including data center Ethernet switches, application delivery controllers (ADCs), software-defined enterprise wide area network (SD-WAN) and WAN optimization appliances (WOAs)—totaled $3.1 billion in the second quarter of 2016 (Q2 2016), growing 11 percent from… Read more →

Customer transitions to software-defined wide-area network technology are taking longer than expected, according to CenturyLink, as networks are being upgraded on a piecemeal basis, not all at once.  This is no surprise to this author, who has pounded the table that SD-WANs would be deployed very slowly because existing networking infrastructure could not easily be… Read more →

This is a question the Telecom Council of Silicon Valley asks of global carriers every September – and they answer at the TC3 Summit. The Council is a bridge between entrepreneurs and telecom giants.  It strives to understand the specific technology gaps of the network operators, so they can be clearly communicated to both start-ups and… Read more →

By Michael Howard, senior research director carrier networks, IHS Markit Bottom Line Three-quarters of carriers participating in the IHS Markit software-defined networking (SDN) survey say they have already deployed or will deploy SDN in 2016; 100 percent plan to deploy the technology at some point The top drivers for service provider SDN investments and deployments… Read more →

Introduction: Two talks are summarized in this second HOTi summary article.  The first examines different topologies for High Performance Computing (HPC) networks with an assumption that Data Center (DC) networks will follow that topology. The second talk was a keynote on the impact of SDN, NFV and other Software Defined WAN/ open networking schemes. 1…. Read more →

by Scott Bicheno & edited by Alan J Weissberger Six of the world’s biggest technology companies have joined forces in order to work out how best to exploit the 150 MHz of unlicensed spectrum that has been made available for commercial use. The spectrum is in the 3.5 GHz band (specifically 3550-3700 MHz) and is… Read more →

By Michael Howard, Senior Research Director Carrier Networks, IHS Markit Key Points: 100 percent of service providers participating in the IHS Markit NFV strategies survey say they will deploy network functions virtualization (NFV) at some point, with 81 percent expecting to do so by 2017 Moreover, 59 percent of operator respondents have deployed or will… Read more →

Executive Summary AT&T has become the newest member of Intel’s Super 7 initiative, a coalition of technology companies — including Facebook, Google and Microsoft — that are seeking to revolutionize the data center. Under a new partnership, AT&T will use Intel’s semiconductor technology to advance its network virtualization strategy and integrated cloud platform. AT&T SDN/NFV… Read more →