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A recent Computerworld article opened up with the provocative statement that wireless bandwidth is like land in Manhattan — it’s extremely valuable because they’re not making more of it. No kidding. That probably explains why it has become such a premium commodity. Until new spectrum can be created (who knows what the future holds there) or existing spectrum can be better utilized, its value, like scarce metals, will continue to rise – some even say, skyrocket. Maybe that’s...

If you have a need for speed in motor cars you buy a high performance motor with the associated price tag. You don’t expect to buy a Ferrari with a Fiat budget, right? And if you want economy motoring, you pay less for a less powerful motor, save money on gas and drive around sedately. So why do mobile broadband customers think things are different for them? It can mainly be put down to mobile operators being so keen to drive data revenues by offering uncapped, all-you-can-eat plans at a time...

The Insider has spent a few days in Hong Kong this week and is now flirting with the might of Typhoon Megi which threatens to close down this dynamic city and the only means of escape - the airport. Hong Kong is one of those cities that is constantly changing and a place where new technology is not only accepted by the community it is embraced, nay, demanded. In terms of wireless technology it is always at the leading edge (some would say bleeding edge), fueled by a very large and incredibly compact...

If you are starting to tire from all the LTE hype going around and daily news of another LTE network activation then maybe it’s time for a reality check. I have always embraced new technology with glee but I am starting to have reservations about LTE and its real purpose. Now, I know that network equipment providers need to constantly innovate to keep selling products and I realize that our networks are being bombarded by data traffic, so those should provide good enough reason to roll out LTE. However...

Lately we have been seeing a huge spike in interest for a variety of applications that manage large numbers of widely distributed intelligent devices in a variety of new broadband networks. One of our partners, Accedian recently put a Nakina application into a US wireless carrier to manage turn-up and test for a large rollout of Ethernet NIDs in a backhaul application; in an another, a top equipment vendor has begun implementing a Nakina Resource Optimization (parameter management) solution for a national IMS rollout supporting consumer VoIP. There are a lot of other cases that can’t yet be disclosed publicly, but they all involve management of networks that are undergoing various stages of disaggregation. In the consumer VoIP example, over 20 individual classes of network element (media gateway controllers, routers, access managers, etc.), deployed in multiple instances, replace a single centralized switch. The new architecture is vastly more flexible, and takes advantage of the inherent efficiencies of packet-based transport, but the flexibility and efficiency come at a cost in terms of increased management complexity. Rev levels, patches, parameter settings, backups, and security in the disaggregated environment can’t be managed without new infrastructure and new methods, and these are often improvised at rollout rather than being baked into the plan. ( photo credit: http://www.computerhistory.org/) It strikes me that what we’re seeing among service providers — and in the management systems that support them — has a lot in common with the evolution of enterprise computer and network architectures — in fact, it’s nothing more than a delayed reflection, played out in an industry that has vastly longer investment cycles and vastly slower technical evolution. The movement out of the 1970s mainframe-centric world and into the ‘peer-to-peer’ minicomputer networking world of the 1980s (the origin of the internet) and then further into the evolution of ubiquitous computing in the 90s and 00s, gave rise to a whole new multibillion dollar industry devoted to management support — network management, PC desktop management, server system administration, and so forth. It created an opportunity for rapid development of hundreds of companies, many of which became billion dollar plus players (CA, IBM’s Tivoli, and BMC for example). We’re still in the early days of a massive transformation from a ‘mainframe’ era of telecommunications into a disaggregated era — based on IMS, LTE, IPTV, femtocells, and ethernet transport (to name only a few examples), with content and service originating from millions of endpoints around the network, not radiating out from its center. It’s time for a new ‘operations software foundry’ to start forging the tools and building the machines that will empower that transformation.