Prayson Pate

Please see last week’s entry on "How Did We Get Here?” for a recap of the history of AT&T.

After the breakup of AT&T, one of the assets that the new RBOCs (now ILECs) had was the copper plant that had been constructed under monopoly conditions.  Part of the deal to enable competitive carriers (CLECs) was providing access to this copper plant and services under the umbrella of “special services”.

I recently started watching the “Downton Abbey” series, which takes place in the second decade of the twentieth century.  The characters are facing massive changes in their lives due to the rapid evolution of technology, including the growing presence of cars, phones and electricity.  Very quickly the characters will go from viewing these inventions as alien intrusions to being necessary parts of the infrastructure of daily life.  They will change how they think.

In previous blog entries I have covered some of the aspects of applying the cloud to the problem of telecom services.  In this segment I close the loop and talk about how we can apply the concepts previously discussed.  As with the characters in Downton Abbey, making this transition will require us to change how we think.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) are hot topics. They are clearly related, but how exactly are they similar? How are they different? How do they complement each other?

SDNCentral recently published my article on this topic.  You can read the article on their site here.

The following graphic illustrates the primary distinctions.

In recent years we have seen radical innovation in telecom in terms of higher bandwidths, dropping costs and ever more powerful applications.  What’s next?  Here are some changes that may be just over the horizon.

In a previous blog entry I discussed some of the technology enablers that led to the success of the cloud, and how they could be applied to other domains such as the metro edge portion of the network.  One key enabler is the use of virtualization and Virtual Machines (VMs) to build the infrastructure of the cloud, which leads to the question, “Can virtualization be applied to the metro edge of the network?” Before digging in further, let’s step back and understand some of the key points of virtualization: abstraction and separation/layering.