We hear a lot about private 5G, meaning 5G networks deployed and owned by individual enterprises. A lot online, anyway; of 177 enterprises I've talked with this year, only three said they even knew how to build a private 5G network, and these three learned by doing it. The three discovered an important, but usually unrecognized, question, which is, “What do I it run on?”
5G resources
What is 5G? Fast wireless technology for enterprises and phones
How 5G frequency affects range and speed
Private 5G can solve some problems that Wi-Fi can’t
Private 5G keeps Whirlpool driverless vehicles rolling
5G can make for cost-effective private backhaul
CBRS can bring private 5G to enterprises
One reason private 5G gets a lot of attention is that vendors have to talk about something, and one choice is to say something exciting and, well, maybe less than factual. The other is to say something factual and utterly uninteresting. Guess which gets said? The three enterprises that built private 5G networks had to educate themselves with a material from a variety of sources, including the O-RAN alliance, and one of the three characterized this as learning another language, with a dozen or Continue reading
We hear a lot about private 5G, meaning 5G networks deployed and owned by individual enterprises. A lot online, anyway; of 177 enterprises I've talked with this year, only three said they even knew how to build a private 5G network, and these three learned by doing it. The three discovered an important, but usually unrecognized, question, which is, “What do I it run on?”
5G resources
What is 5G? Fast wireless technology for enterprises and phones
How 5G frequency affects range and speed
Private 5G can solve some problems that Wi-Fi can’t
Private 5G keeps Whirlpool driverless vehicles rolling
5G can make for cost-effective private backhaul
CBRS can bring private 5G to enterprises
One reason private 5G gets a lot of attention is that vendors have to talk about something, and one choice is to say something exciting and, well, maybe less than factual. The other is to say something factual and utterly uninteresting. Guess which gets said? The three enterprises that built private 5G networks had to educate themselves with a material from a variety of sources, including the O-RAN alliance, and one of the three characterized this as learning another language, with a dozen or Continue reading
There's a lot in networking that never measures up to the hype, so maybe it's good that this is balanced sometimes by areas where the hype falls far short of reality. Managed services is one of those things.It always seems to be bubbling just below the surface of attention, and yet it may be the most important topic in networking today. I had a chance to chat with 59 enterprises that were involved with or launching managed-service projects and another 118 who had no current managed-service projects. I'll summarize what I found here.SD-WAN buyers guide: Key questions to ask vendors
All of these enterprises had been aware of managed services for at least 20 years, and all but 31 had considered them at one point or another. Interestingly, 141 of the 177 total enterprises believe that MPLS VPNs are a form of managed service, and when I dug into this, the response was that “managed services” are about reducing the user's management burden. VPNs do that, so they're a sort-of-managed service.To read this article in full, please click here
Network-operations types tell me that, in the future, AI is going to manage their networks. They also tell me that their vendors told them that very same thing. The good news is that’s sort-of-true. The bad news is the same; with emphasis on the qualifier “sort-of”. To get the most from AI network management, you have to navigate out of that hazy “sort-of” zone, and you do it by thinking about ants and farmers.Ants can build wonderfully complex anthills, with all manner of interconnecting tunnels and levels. Do the worker ants have some mighty engineer-ant directing this process? Nope. Each of them is single-mindedly performing its own simple task, and instincts program them. There is in fact an ant-engineer, but it’s their own DNA that’s organized their work to accomplish the goal. That’s a bit like how most network AI works.To read this article in full, please click here
OK, let's say you're a CIO who's promoted hybrid cloud computing in your company. Then along came all these news stories that call into question the whole notion of cloud economies. Do you send some covert IT team to block the news from the CFO's computer, or do you deal with it? Hopefully, the latter.I've examined audits of over four-dozen cloud projects, and the good news is that most cloud applications make the business case. The bad news is that a lot, a worrisome lot, don’t. If you want yours to succeed, there are some strategies that will help, in the form of five “forgets” and four “remembers”.To read this article in full, please click here
If you’re an enterprise CIO, CFO, or network operations type, you’ve probably been reading about how this service provider or that cloud provider have saved up to 50% on network equipment by using generic “white-box” technology instead of proprietary routers and switches. It’s hard not to wonder whether your own network budget could buy twice as much gear, and what projects might now meet their business case. Could enterprises get in on the white-box revolution? Maybe, if they can address the issues that even service providers and cloud providers have already faced, and in some cases been bitten by.Compatibility
The first issue is finding the hardware and software. White-box hardware needs software, either an all-inclusive “network operating system” that provides all the features you need, or an operating system plus a separate routing/switching package. The software can’t just be shoveled onto something and run; it has to match the hardware. In some cases, the matching process is facilitated through the same sort of drivers found on PCs and servers, but not all hardware has a driver suitable for all software. Pick a white box and you may not find software you like for it. Continue reading
Who, in the entire IT space, wouldn’t like to see an uptick in tech spending? Enterprises would see new purchases easier to make, vendors would make more money, and technologists in general would have a new sense of excitement and mission. It seems like we’ve been stuck in a do-more-for-less rut, but the past offers us some evidence of how we could get out of it.If you were to plot of the growth in enterprise IT spending versus GDP growth for the US over the entire life of information technology, you’d see not a hockey stick but a series of peaks and valleys. You would see that there are three clear periods or cycles where IT spending has significantly outstripped GDP growth, and that we’ve been in a trough ever since the last one ended in about 2000. We’ve never had two decades pass without another cycle, so what’s wrong? Answer: Nothing’s driving one now.To read this article in full, please click here
Sometimes it’s hard to see gradual changes in technology paradigms because they’re gradual. Sometimes it helps to play “Just suppose…” and see where it leads. So, just suppose that the cloud did what some radical thinkers say, and “absorbed the network”. That’s sure an exciting tag line, but is this even possible, and how might it come about?Companies are already committed to a virtual form of networking for their WAN services, based on VPNs or SD-WAN, rather than building their own WANs from pipes and routers. That was a big step, so what could be happening to make WANs even more virtual, to the point where the cloud could subsume them? It would have to be a data-center change.To read this article in full, please click here
Sometimes it’s hard to see gradual changes in technology paradigms because they’re gradual. Sometimes it helps to play “Just suppose…” and see where it leads. So, just suppose that the cloud did what some radical thinkers say, and “absorbed the network”. That’s sure an exciting tag line, but is this even possible, and how might it come about?Companies are already committed to a virtual form of networking for their WAN services, based on VPNs or SD-WAN, rather than building their own WANs from pipes and routers. That was a big step, so what could be happening to make WANs even more virtual, to the point where the cloud could subsume them? It would have to be a data-center change.To read this article in full, please click here
Sometimes it’s hard to see gradual changes in technology paradigms because they’re gradual. Sometimes it helps to play “Just suppose…” and see where it leads. So, just suppose that the cloud did what some radical thinkers say, and “absorbed the network”. That’s sure an exciting tag line, but is this even possible, and how might it come about?Companies are already committed to a virtual form of networking for their WAN services, based on VPNs or SD-WAN, rather than building their own WANs from pipes and routers. That was a big step, so what could be happening to make WANs even more virtual, to the point where the cloud could subsume them? It would have to be a data-center change.To read this article in full, please click here
I can’t tell you how many times one of my clients or contacts has complained about the difficulties associated with getting network-budget approval. If I’d never met a CFO in person, the description these people gave me would have led me to expect something like a troll or a zombie, bent on eating projects and maybe people, too. Do we wear garlic when we visit the CFO, or maybe do a chant before the meeting, or might there be a more practical approach?CFOs aren’t just trying to mess up a good technology project (at least most of the time), they’re trying to validate two basic financial rules that govern technology procurements. Rule One is that any project must advance a company’s financial position and not hurt it. That seems logical, but it’s often difficult to assess just what the return on investment (ROI) of any project is. Rule Two is that you don’t want to buy equipment that you’ll have to replace before it’s been fully depreciated. The useful life of something should be at least as long as the financial life as set by tax laws.To read this article in full, please click here
OK, help me understand this. Microsoft just spent almost $20 billion to buy Nuance, the company that supplies the popular Dragon speech-to-text tool. Microsoft already has speech-to-text available in Windows 10 and through Azure, and even a partnership with Nuance. Nuance’s single big jump in stock price in its history coincides with Covid and WFH, which is now (hopefully) passing. Nuance revenue boom? Apparently, ending. The Dragon product? Incremental to Microsoft’s current position. Health care vertical? Interesting, but not a cash cow.To read this article in full, please click here
There’s open, then there’s open. At least that seems to be the case with network technology. Maybe it’s the popularity and impact of open-source software, or maybe it’s just that the word “open” makes you think of being wild, happy, and free—whatever it is, the concept of openness in networking is catching on. Which means, of course, that the definition is getting fuzzier every day.When I talk with enterprises, they seem to think that openness in networking is the opposite of proprietary, which they then define is a technology for which there is a single source. That suggests that open networking is based on technology for which multiple sources exist, but as logical as that sounds, it may not help much.To read this article in full, please click here
We all know the old saw about pushing a strand of spaghetti uphill, and I’ve got to wonder whether that’s what we’re now doing with 5G.
5G resources
What is 5G? Fast wireless technology for enterprises and phones
How 5G frequency affects range and speed
Private 5G can solve some problems that Wi-Fi can’t
Private 5G keeps Whirlpool driverless vehicles rolling
5G can make for cost-effective private backhaul
CBRS can bring private 5G to enterprises
First, 5G is going to happen because of the orderly process of modernizing wireless networks. It doesn’t need “justifying”. The problem is that vendors want 5G to be revolutionary and transformational, rather than orderly. Second, that need to seem revolutionary has pushed 5G stories to the boundaries of sensibility.To read this article in full, please click here
If you stop and think, a lot of our expectations about network services are really about personality—our own. We’d like our services to work, well, the way we work. We’d like them to know us, to tune to our needs, right? Do you think that some giant global interconnect with hundreds of thousands of elements is going to be able to do that? Nope, which means personalized services will have to come down to the only piece we really own—the lowly network edge.We learned decades ago that you can’t make giant networks user- or service-aware. Awareness of this sort, which is known as “statefulness” in network-speak, means sticking little pieces of a virtual-you into the network to represent your interests. Maybe these pieces are an entry in a routing table, or maybe they’re a policy stored in some repository and sent to the devices that handle your traffic, but they’re individualized if what they’re doing is to personalize. That just doesn’t scale. Not only are there too many little pieces, network traffic could get reconfigured or a device could fail, and all at once your personalizing pieces aren’t even where your traffic Continue reading
Tom Nolle