Backgrounder: Fiber optics transmission – both short haul within a Data Center (DC) and long haul for WAN transport- have made great progress in recent years.  While it took 12 to 14 years (from 2000 to 2012-2014) to go from 1G to 10G Ethernet in the DC, it’s taken only a couple of years to… Read more →

Article written by R. Krause of Investors Business Daily (investors.com) & edited by Alan J Weissberger. Followed by a blog post from IEEE’s Alan Gatherer f Huawei and then a reference to a superb 5G presentation from IEEE’s Jonathan Wells of AJIC consulting IBD Article: Bottom Line:  Could high frequencies let AT&T or Verizon out do… Read more →

The 11th annual IDC Directions conference was held in San Jose, CA last week. The saga of the 3rd platform (Cloud, Mobile, Social, Big/Data Analytics) continues unabated. One of many IT predictions was that artifical intelligence (AI) and deep learning/machine learning are a big part of the new application development. IDC predicts 50% of developer… Read more →

One of the more interesting trends from MWC-2016 in Barcelona last month is content delivery networks (CDNs) for mobile operators.  [A CDN is an interconnected system of cache servers that deliver web content based on geographical proximity. The CDN concept originated in the wire-line Internet world for traditional video services over “best effort” Internet transport.]  A Mobile CDN is a network… Read more →

IHS-Infonetics released excerpts from its NFV Orchestration Software Vendor Leadership Analysis, which profiles and analyzes 10 leading network functions virtualization (NFV) orchestration software vendors: Brocade, Ciena Blue Planet, Cisco, Dell, Ericsson, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Huawei, Juniper, NEC/Netcracker and Nokia.  The report examines vendors’ approaches to and overall activities in the NFV orchestration software market to understand how suppliers are approaching this… Read more →

IHS-Infonetics recently released excerpts from its Data Center and Enterprise SDN Vendor Leadership Analysis report, which profiles and analyzes 10 leading data center and enterprise software-defined networking (SDN) vendors: Broadcom, Brocade, Cisco, Cumulus Networks, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Huawei, Juniper, NEC, Nuage Networks from Nokia and VMware.   The report looks at vendors from a number of segments, including Ethernet switch, Ethernet… Read more →

US telecom network providers can provide voice and broadband service to Cuba without government permission following a Federal Communications Commission announcement that it has removed the island nation from its “Exclusion List.”  The Exclusion List identifies countries and facilities that are not covered by grant of a global facilities-based Section 214 application and require a… Read more →

Introduction: On December 2nd, Nokia shareholders overwhelmingly approved the acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent . The only remaining full service telecom equipment company in either North America or Europe is being sold to Nokia in a 15.6 billion Euro (€) deal which could make the “new Nokia” a market leader in network equipment and cloud services for… Read more →

Disaggregation of IT equipment started with Facebook driving the Open Compute Project (OCP) to open up the design of compute servers.  It then extended to bare metal switches and white boxes (such as those from Pica8), especially for Software Defined Networks.  That represents a huge competitive threat to traditional switch/router vendors. The latest disaggregation effort… Read more →

“[R&D work] is in the operations,” Bhaskar Gorti, Alcatel-Lucent‘s president of IP platforms, told Light Reading without hesitation at a recent on-site visit. “Getting a network function to run in a virtualized network is fine, but the reality is that there will be a hybrid world of virtual and physical networks. How do you operate it?” This… Read more →