Don't Fear Transformation, Embrace It

By: Scott St. John - Pipeline

Transformation is scary. But, when you peel back the layers of technical jargon, transformation is nothing more than change. And people don't like change. Change has risk. Change is uncomfortable. But without change, everything stays the same. The simple fact is, if you want different results, you must change something.Unfortunately, transformation is necessary to compete in today's marketplace. It's one thing to say that to get to where you want to be, you must leap over this deep, dark hole…

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Creating Speed and Agility in New Network Deployments with a Factory Built Network

By: Greg Byrne

Today, network operators seeking competitive edge must prioritize and exercise agility. The most successful must rapidly vet and deploy new technology so that they can compete by offering greater value in the most appropriate technology, performance, predictability and ecosystem enablement. To explain the pressure for rapid deployment, it’s essential to look at today’s disruptive business environment. Rapidly increasing bandwidth requirements for transport networks is a major driving factor. An ever-increasing need for network implementation speed is also the result of an increasingly competitive landscape for such enterprises as cloud service providers, content providers, and traditional competitive communications service providers…

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Keeping Pace with 5G

By: Daria Batrakova

Emerging 5G networks create new opportunities for telecom providers to deliver services for enterprises and consumers at greater capacities, accelerated speeds, and lower latencies. In addition to enabling faster mobile and fixed wireless access, 5G networks also support cutting-edge technologies for Industrial IoT, AR and VR applications, AI and blockchain. Applications such as smart factory, E-agriculture, autonomous driving, AI-powered health diagnostics, and personal robot assistants are now a reality…

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The Telco Generation Gap

By: Mark Cummings, Ph.D.

Today’s telco industry is facing a challenge. As the industry goes through wrenching technology, ecosystem, and business changes, it is confronting a generational shift. One generation is at or nearing retirement, while another ascendant. The two generations are not working well together and, if this doesn’t change, the industry will encounter serious difficulties. What’s going on? Simply put, the problem is that the two groups aren’t listening to each other. Each generation thinks it is right—and that the other is wrong…

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The Physical Reality of the Virtual World

By: Karel Hodan

Today, virtual networking is the new paradigm for building networks, and it is critical to the success of 5G. In essence, it leads to a decoupling of physical infrastructure from the services that the network delivers. Yet, virtual networking contains an inherent paradox. With virtual resources, service level management is completely separated from the underlying physical resources required for service delivery. The capacity required for a service is drawn from the capacity of the virtual resource, which is configurable at the level of the physical resource…

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Independent Data Center Alliance: Transforming Challenge into Opportunity

By: Jeana Durst

Data is the new oil. You have heard this phrase circulating in the industry for a while, but have you considered the gravity of this new reality? In 2017, The Economist stated that data had officially surpassed oil as the world’s most valuable resource. And the growth continues: According to Forbes, humanity’s current rate of data creation is doubling every two years, and by 2025 researchers expect that the amount of data will double every 12 hours. In Structure Research’s 2019 Global Colocation Report, the global data center colocation and interconnection (DCI) market is set to grow at a rate of 10…

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Virtualizing Data Centers for Digital Transformation

By: Arun Shenoy

An exponential increase in data is on the horizon. It’s coming from the advent of 5G networks, the increase in mobile computing, and the many connected people, places, and things that will come online as the IoT continues to become mainstream. Just how much of a data increase will we see? IDC forecasts that 175 zettabytes (ZB) of data will be produced by 2025—an uptick from just 33ZB last year—of which 90ZB will be created by IoT devices. That’s a 430 percent increase in just five and a half years—let that sink in for a moment…

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Articulating Customer Value: The Value Statement Must Be Table Stakes for Telcos

By: Adhish Kulkarni

Over the past 20 years, telecoms operators have played a key role in enabling the digital advertising and marketing industries, providing channels and connectivity through which brands have become able to reach their customers anytime and anywhere. This shift has created hundreds of billions of dollars of marketing real estate. Yet, despite their role, telcos themselves haven’t been able to truly maximize their own marketing investments through the channels they own, even though their customers are reachable from their first connected minute…

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Letter from the Editor

By: Scott St. John - Pipeline

In the April, 2nd 1965 issue of Time magazine titled "The Computer in Society," author and economist Joseph Froomkin presupposed that, based upon the advent and adoption of the computer, "automation will eventually bring about a 20-hour work week." The article went on to surmise that that automation would lead to the creation of "a mass leisure class" which would then lead to several foreboding economic and social impacts, including two-percent employment and "non-functional lives," creating "a severe test of the deeply ingrained ethic that work is the good and necessary calling of man…

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Telecom Industry News

By: Scott St. John - Pipeline

August may be considered the “dog days” of summer, but the industry news this month certainly didn’t slow its rhythm. Major themes included mergers, 5G launches, and efforts to close the digital divide. T-Mobile and Sprint received US Department of Justice clearance this month, a step toward paving the way for the new T-Mobile. Verizon lit up 5G in its fifth US city—St. Paul, Minnesota—and Vodafone continued to expand its 5G network, now covering 15 cities and towns in the UK. Here in the US, the FCC actively took on robocall protocols and efforts to further close the digital divide…

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