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AI and the rise of chief data and digital officers (CD2Os)October 16, 2018Over the past decade or so, we have frequently heard about chief technology and information officers (CTIOs), the combination of the chief information officer (CIO) function with that of the chief technology officer (CTO). The rationale has been that because information technology (IT) and telecom network technology are converging and becoming more and more intertwined, the two offices can no longer be separate; instead, there is a need to form a single function aimed at harmonizing all changes, triggered by the implementation of best IT practices into telecom networks. Clients, please log in to view the full content.Subscribers Only
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It’s hard to get rid of those good old DMS switches!June 12, 2018That’s the key takeaway from Ribbon Perspectives 18’s Network Transformation panel held on June 5 in Los Angeles. With more than 600 attendees and loud L.A. style music blasting before, between, and after sessions, the event keeps growing. And of course, you don’t want to miss those perspectives. The panel had representatives from BT, Bell, and Verizon, all talking about their ongoing network transformation initiatives. All three are big on the role of software defined networks (SDN) as the key enabler of automation while preserving some of the legacy nodes that are fully depreciated and providing high reliability. Clients, please log in to view the full content.Subscribers Only
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DTW 2018: The winding, bumpy road to digital transformationMay 21, 2018That’s what we heard first thing in the morning when TM Forum CEO Nik Willetts kicked off this year’s plenary session in rainy Nice, France. In fact, Willetts quoted a McKinsey study saying 70% of transformation projects fail; we found the 50% by directly asking some of our service provider relationships participating at the event, including Orange. And to clarify what we mean by “fail,” transformation projects are costly and do not necessarily deliver the planned ROI, nor do they contribute to lower opex. Overall, the event, rebranded Digital Transformation World (DTW), was as well attended as last year although we found the aisles of the show floor particularly empty on the last day, Wednesday, May 16. Does this mean everyone had had enough of digital transformation? Probably not—most vendors including Amdocs, Ericsson, HPE, Huawei, and Netcracker were very satisfied with the quality of the meetings conducted with their customers. Clients, please log in to view the full content.Subscribers Only
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Huawei sustains plateaued service provider outsourcing marketMay 09, 2018Despite unabated need for service providers to outsource non-core tasks, 2017 was marked by slower growth in the service provider outsourcing market. Worldwide revenue reached $67 billion last year, an increase of just 1 percent over 2016.
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Huawei Analyst Summit 2018: Carrier networks at a crossroadsMay 02, 2018The 2018 Huawei Global Analyst Summit was, as usual, a large, lavish, and information-packed affair. From executive-level insights into the overall direction of the business to more in-depth and detailed insights on Huawei technology across a wide range of areas, this year’s event provided a good overall view of the state of the telecommunications industry with a primary focus on business in China and Asia. A key takeaway is that the carrier networks business is at a crossroads—and it is not clear at this stage whether 5G will be able to come to the rescue. The consumer and enterprise segments, supplemented by a new business addressing public cloud services, anchored growth for the company in 2017. Clients, please log in to view the full content.Subscribers Only
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Unleashing the new 5G un-carrierMay 02, 2018This is the third time a merger between the third- and fourth-largest US wireless service providers has been proposed. The previous time, last year, the deal ended over a dispute over who would control the combined business. Softbank founder Masayoshi Son, whose firm acquired Sprint for $22B in 2013 with an eye toward combining it with T-Mobile, was reluctant to give up control of Sprint. The run up to 5G has apparently changed his mind, and this time around the new business will be called T-Mobile and will be run by current T-Mobile CEO John Legere. Clients, please log in to view the full content.Subscribers Only
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The third year in a row of capex cuts in China!April 02, 2018After the 2015 LTE rollout peak that pushed China’s total capex to the roof at RMB439B—including RMB162B for LTE alone, the three service providers made it clear that they would slow down their spending dramatically, and indeed they slammed the brakes! The end goal is to bring capital intensity (e.g., capex-to-revenue ratio) somewhere between sustainable levels of about 24% and healthy levels of 15%; those benchmarks come from western telecom companies, of course, and became fundamental to driving the recovery after the telecom crash of 2000. Clients, please log in to view the full content.Subscribers Only
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MWC18: What the C-level service provider suite says about 5GMarch 09, 2018As usual at this time of year, I did my pilgrimage to Barcelona’s Mobile World Congress, which according to the GSMA was attended by 107,000 people—1,000 fewer than last year. Was this due to the cold front that hit the entire European region all the way to the south? Many people did not manage to land in Barcelona due to flight cancellations. Meanwhile, this event is branded as the world’s largest of its kind, at least in the not-so-vibrant mobile industry. To provide some perspective, I like to remind people that Salesforce.com founder and CEO Marc Benioff brought 170,000 people to the Dreamforce event in San Francisco last year; that is one-fifth of the city’s population, and cruise ships were provided to address insufficient hotel room supply. More importantly, I conducted my usual C-level service provider tour, a mix of formal and informal discussions. Some were scheduled, and others were just on the run. And, of course, it was all about 5G. Clients, please log in to view the full content.Subscribers Only
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The mysterious case of a rising IndiaFebruary 01, 2018While Brazil and Russia were in recession in 2015 and 2016, IHS Markit found that India’s economy was chugging along, pushing the nation’s real GDP growth rates at 8% and 7.1% for those years, respectively. As a result, India moved into seventh place in 2015 after passing Italy and Brazil and kicking out Russia (which allowed Canada back into the top 10). Last year, IHS Markit expected India’s real GDP to grow 6.5%, which should have moved India into sixth place after passing France. Clients, please log in to view the full content.Subscribers Only
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China sets its sights on the optical components marketJanuary 18, 2018In January 2018, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) released its Optoelectronic Devices Industry Technology Roadmap, a five-year plan to improve China’s capabilities in the optoelectronics industry. Although the plan spans a wide range of fundamental technologies in the optical domain, there is a strong focus on optical communications devices, which will have a significant impact on the global optical components industry supporting optical transport and networking. Clients, please log in to view the full content.Subscribers Only
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The 2018 telecom capex forecast is looking upJanuary 12, 2018As mentioned in the IHS Markit 15 November 2017 Service Provider Revenue and Capex Biannual Market Tracker, all regions will experience some level of moderate capex growth this year (see Exhibit 1) with US-led North America in the driver’s seat Clients, please log in to view the full content.Subscribers Only
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As data is the new oil and AI the engine, service providers rejoiceDecember 05, 2017Sell your subscriber data and make big money! That’s literally what NTT DOCOMO did. The first of its kind, Telco Data Analytics USA was held in Palo Alto from November 28 to 29. The event featured a broad roster of experts from various fields ranging from service providers such as AT&T, Bell Canada, Charter, NTT DOCOMO, Orange, Sprint, and T-Mobile US to data scientists from Apple, Google, IBM, and LinkedIn, as well as all sorts of equipment vendors, all sharing the same thing in common: data and artificial intelligence (AI). The attendance was close to 100 people, and it’s worth mentioning that Huawei was the lead sponsor, followed by Gold Sponsors Dell EMC and Nokia and Silver Sponsor NetScout. Other Bronze and Associate Sponsors were mainly data specialists like Cardinality, CellMining, and Subex. Clients, please log in to view the full content.Subscribers Only
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Connected cows are the new cash cowNovember 29, 2017That’s what Huawei Deputy Chairman and Rotating CEO Ken Hu said at the Chinese vendor's Global Mobile Broadband Forum in London on 15 November 2017 during the opening keynote. He told the crowd of 1,400 attendees (up from 1,200 last year in Tokyo and 900 in 2015 in Hong Kong) that in north-western China, dairy farmers are using smart collar technology to track everything from the grazing habits of their herds to the specific body temperature of individual cows. In doing so, they are dramatically increasing milk yields and raising profitability. And that is what I call the Internet of Animals (IoA), a significant component of the massive IoT opportunity, also seen as a chief 5G driver. Clients, please log in to view the full content.Subscribers Only
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US 2018 Capex Forecast Is Looking UpNovember 10, 2017I’m not yet saying Sprint has turned the corner, but what we know for sure is that after talks to merge with T-Mobile US fell apart over the weekend, the company is moving forward as a standalone entity and said Tuesday, 7 November 2017, that it would increase spending on its network. In fact, according to Sprint Chief Financial Officer Tarek Robbiati, the merger had little to do with this capex hike; rather, it’s coming from the Altice partnership, which would have happened anyway. Announced Sunday, 5 November 2017, US cable operator Altice USA will sell mobile service on Sprint’s network under a new multi-year agreement. Now the high expectation has clearly shifted overnight from a failed merger to the Altice partnership, which is suddenly putting pressure on Sprint to install new antennas as soon as possible. As a result, Sprint plans to raise money to fund its network investment by avoiding expensive traditional debt and using its airwave licenses as collateral. Clients, please log in to read the full content.Subscribers Only
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When AI and SON Meet, We Have a Self-Driving NetworkNovember 01, 2017As usual this time of the year, I chaired KNect365’s Self-Organising Networks World, which was rebranded last year. Held in London where it started in 2010, this eighth annual SON conference was well attended with more than 120 delegates, which is about the same number as last year but a different crowd that reflects another interesting vendor dynamic. Clients, please log in to view the full content.Subscribers Only
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5G has triggered a fiber hunt and investment spikeOctober 10, 2017Since its invention by Corning Glass researchers Robert Maurer, Donald Keck, and Peter Schultz in 1970, it was clear that optical fiber would eventually become the nerve of telecommunications networks. The fiber-optic cable race started in the 80s for long distance transatlantic communications systems and moved to long haul terrestrial links in the late 90s during the Internet bubble. The run up ended in March 2000 with a fiber glut that marked the beginning of the great telecom crash. Since then, the fiber-optic business has become very cyclical with significant ups and downs and is now sustained by Google and Facebook building their own undersea and terrestrial fiber-optic networks to link data centers, as well as China, which spent $182B between 2015 and 2017 to build its own network. Now with 5G on the horizon, all service providers and governments are looking for fiber. Clients, please log in to view the full content.Subscribers Only
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Quantum Networking: A Novel Art of Transmitting Zeroes and OnesJuly 31, 2017Although quantum physics is not a new field, we’ve increasingly been hearing about the potential of using the laws of quantum physics for processing, transmitting, and distributing information. Also known as quantum mechanics, including field theory, quantum physics deals with the fundamental theory of small-scale, low-energy level objects that share some properties of waves such as a specific frequency and wavelength, some spread over space, and some properties of particles—they're generally countable and can be localized to some degree because quantum mechanics cannot predict the exact location of a particle in space, only the probability of finding it at different locations. Clients, please log in to view the full content.Subscribers Only
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On the Extreme Edge, a Double Triple: AT&T Domain 3.0 and Google Cloud 3.0June 22, 2017The “software-defined” focus of telecom means not only separation of the control plane and the data plane with a centralized view of the whole network or its major parts but also a distribution of intelligence—read compute—in stepping stones toward the extreme edge of the network. We hear “edge compute” embodied in such efforts as MEC, at first in “Mobile Edge Compute,” morphing into “Multi-access Edge Compute”.Subscribers Only
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TM Forum Talk Was All About Digital Transformation, but the Reality Is DifferentJune 01, 2017Once again I attended the TM Forum, held in lovely Nice from May 15 to 17, just a week before the commencement of the Cannes Festival and two weeks before the Grand Prix de Monaco. Needless to say, the French Riviera was very busy during the event, which was marked by a strong focus on digital transformation, whatever that means! Clients, please log in to view the full content.Subscribers Only
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Commercial 5G Is Coming Fast, but Forget Mobility—It’s Just a mmWave-based Fixed Wireless Access Service Like LMDSMay 02, 2017Although this is far less sexy than the usual eye-catching 5G use cases discussed every day like autonomous cars, augmented and virtual reality, massive IoT, and remote robotic surgery, the way 5G developments are rapidly unraveling suggests point-to-multipoint (PMP) networks running on millimeter waves for fixed wireless access services will go live next year, if not in 4Q17. 4 recent major facts lead to this conclusion. Please log in to view the full content.Subscribers Only
