Posted on behalf of David Dixon, FBR Capital Markets Sprint CEO Marcello Claure has undertaken a strategic review of Sprint’s competitive positioning according to our vendor checks. Claure is an entrepreneur who seeks to move quickly to reposition the company. While he is not a network engineer, he understands that the network is a strategic… Read more →

Infonetics Research, now part of IHS Inc. (NYSE: IHS), forecasts that bare metal switches (which decouple hardware from software and offer greater agility and cost savings over traditional data center switches) will make up just under a quarter of all data center ports shipped worldwide in 2019, up from 11 percent in 2014.   Infonetics’ fourth… Read more →

Introduction: Google’s keynote talk on this topic at last Thursday’s Light Reading New IP conference was very profound.  Google and its eight partners (identified below) in this OpenConfig initiative want to specify a vendor neutral type of provisioning & configuration system that will work with any type or brand of network equipment.  It’s called OpenConfig.  In… Read more →

NOTE:  An update to this article is at:   https://techblog.comsoc.org/2015/06/20/cuba-to-expand-internet-access-and-lower-price-of-wifi-connections Introduction: Recognizing the urgent need to improve its infrastructure and bolster the private sector economy, Castro & company felt the need to engage the U.S. in dialog to get U.S. companies to invest in the island, especially in telecommunications and information infrastructure.   We were… Read more →

Infonetics Research released vendor market share and analysis from its 3rd quarter 2014 (3Q14) Service Provider Routers and Switches report.  Author & Infonetics co-founder Michael Howard writes that Carrier Ethernet Switches had a terrific quarter and year:   “…Carrier Ethernet switches (CES) had an unprecedented quarter, with global revenue up 32% from the previous quarter… Read more →

by David Dixon,  – FBR Capital Markets [edited by Alan J Weissberger] Backgrounder: The FCC has long sought to impose rules requiring Internet providers to offer “net neutral” treatment to all Web traffic but has faced  litigation over its legal authority at every step. The FCC’s next move  following Verizon’s successful appeal of the FCC’s Open… Read more →

1.  Infonetics Research released excerpts from its 2014 Cloud Service Strategies: North American Enterprise Survey, which explores businesses’ plans for the adoption and usage of cloud services. Infonetics survey respondents rated Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, Google and Cisco top cloud service providers (CSPs). Note that those companies are perceived as the top CSPs, independent of their… Read more →

Note:  This is a condensed summary of two previously published articles on this excellent conference.   http://viodi.com/category/weissberger/ Introduction: The telco data center [1] (DC) is likely to be the first place network operators deploy Network Virtualization/Network Functions Virtualization (NFV).  That was the opening statement at the Light Reading conference on NFV and the Data Center, … Read more →

Infonetics Research released excerpts from its 2014 Data Center and Enterprise SDN Hardware and Software report, which defines and sizes the market for software-defined networks (SDN).  SDN MARKET HIGHLIGHTS:.    Vendors are seeding the market with SDN-capable Ethernet switches in the data center and enterprise LAN.    The leaders in the SDN market will be solidified during… Read more →

Introduction: We compare and contrast two keynote speeches from opening day (Aug 26th) of the 2014 IEEE Hot Interconnects conference, held at Google’s campus in Mt View, CA.  The focus is on disruptive innovation giving rise to radically new hardware..or not? Abstract:  The God Box is Dead, by J.R. Rivers of Cumulus Networks The maturing landscape in… Read more →