Access - Commentary
Recession reprieve?
I’m doing the reporting right now for a February cover story on the state of industry “transformation” projects, and like everywhere else, the shape of the economy keeps creeping up as an issue....
There Are No Excuses
Telcos' voice customers have defected to cellular carriers in a phenomenon known as 'wireless substitution', to cable companies that offer digital voice service, and to VoIP purveyors like Skype and Vonage....
A bright spot uncovered
In the current economy, many companies seem to be hunkering down. Not Adtran....
Offshoring network operations – No longer a "pipe" dream
Telecom services providers are leaving no stone unturned to reduce operational costs....
Is the FCC closing the barn door too early?
The FCC has decided Comcast illegally disrupted peer-to-peer traffic by using deep packet inspection technology. ...
Bandwidth: How much is enough?
Verizon’s June announcement that it will expand availability of its 50 megabit per second (Mbps) FiOS broadband service has prompted some to ask, “How much bandwidth could a household need?” To estimate the demand, various analysts have attempted to calculate a household’s future maximum peak bandwidth requirements...
Will PBT go away?
PBT was supposed to be simple. And it is, according to Fujitsu Network Communications, which today announced that it is now going to push the connection-oriented technology as the “ideal” choice for metro Ethernet transport...
Why carrier-class Ethernet is an intelligent choice
Services that enable increased bandwidth and the ability to scale alongside business needs will become even more critical to enterprises seeking to increase productivity without increasing costs. One such service allowing this is carrier-class Ethernet...
Are you smarter than Ethernet?
At NXTcomm08, you’re likely to hear a lot of talk about making Ethernet more sophisticated, more discerning, and most of all, “more intelligent.” Of course, stressing the need for a more intelligent brand of Ethernet isn’t very flattering to the plain-vanilla kind. But let’s face it, Ethernet has always been in some ways like the Forrest Gump of the networking world...
Capex with a capital C
Capital expenditures (capex) remain the most closely watched metric for determining the direction and level of investment that telecom carriers are making in network equipment and services. The problem is that capex is never linear in its behavior. Predicting what the carriers are likely to spend on their networks is a black art, at best...
The numbers don't lie
Earnings reports are a study in spin -- read a press release announcing even the most dire earnings, and you'll be hard-pressed to find the gloom and doom among the highlighted statistics...
MDU Odd Couples
Remember the opening to the Odd Couple TV show, which asked whether two divorced men could share an apartment without driving each other crazy? Here at the Broadband Properties Summit in Dallas today, I heard a building owner basically paraphrase that line, talking about telecom providers competing for customers in the same multidwelling unit...
Green packets and broadband
Five global forces drive growth and transformation. They are at work everywhere, albeit at varying levels of intensity, and they will change the telecommunications world...
Public/private potholes
This has been a tough week for public/private partnerships in the telecom sector. Last night the city of Corpus Christi, Texas, voted to take its Wi-Fi network back from EarthLink, which bought the 147-square-mile network a year ago for roughly the same amount it cost the city to build ($7 million)...
The big bandwidth lie
Perhaps it all started with Brian Roberts. Standing on the stage on a balmy Las Vegas morning, Roberts wowed the bleary eyed crowd by downloading a 4 gigabit collection of encyclopedias and dictionaries in just a shade under four minutes...
Power crisis looming?
Telecom power is a little like Rodney Dangerfield … it gets no respect! Well, not really. But, DC power is one of the last elements to be designed into a telecom network, after the packet-this and optical-that systems are selected...
Telco transformation: A do-or-die proposition
For the telcos, the 20th century was all about growth. A telco’s size was measured by its access lines. Its mission was to add more lines every year. But the 21 century offers a different challenge...
Microsoft, Yahoo! and the myth of the dumb pipe
So where’s the service provider bid for Yahoo! now that it’s on the market? Obviously, it’s nowhere to be seen. And that’s a good, sensible thing...
The riddle of the convergence gateway
To answer subscribers’ cravings for communications and entertainment services that will flow across any type of access network and display on any type of device, carriers need to reconstruct the edges of their networks to perform the session management acrobatics required to fulfill these end user expectations...
