US telco AT&T identified the white box as the future of network design last year and has since committed to installing over 60,000 of them in its 5G mobile network towers and small cells over the next few years.
AT&T is just the latest telco to offload some or all of its data centres to a new generation of non-competitive colocation companies as it shifts emphasis to core connectivity provision and cloud service delivery from third party hosting facilities.
It's always important to take analyst forecasts with a pinch of salt. Predicting the future is difficult at the best of times (see our article on predictions in ITProportal) and a single unexpected geo-political event (Brexit anyone?) can scupper the most meticulously prepared financial projection overnight.
The pace of scale of enterprise and service provider SD-WAN deployment accelerated sharply in 2017
2017 was a good year for software defined wide area networks (SD-WANs), as increasing numbers of end user organisations replaced branch office routers with lower cost and easier to manage virtualised solutions.
Access to BT’s dark fibre network will open new commercial possibilities for communication service providers
After sustained pressure from the UK telecoms regulator Ofcom BT has agreed to open up its dark fibre network to rival communications service providers (CSPs) from October 1st 2017. The new product - Dark Fibre Access (DFA) - should allow companies which want to lease BT’s network to deliver a wider range of higher speed network services to business and consumer customers under their own brand.
TalkTalk is well known for the voice and data connectivity services it offers to UK consumers, but it has been quietly building a flexible, high capacity IP network which also accommodates increasing numbers of business customers.
Revenue for TalkTalk Business accounted for over 30% of the £1.8bn total in the financial year ending March 2016, up 5% on the previous year and driven largely by growth in demand for data products, next generation voice services and broadband connections delivered by both its direct channel and wholesale partners.
A host of broadband suppliers are offering superfast network connectivity on a limited basis in certain regions, towns and cities of the UK
Our feature this month looks at a few examples or regional broadband providers to illustrate their different business models and the diversity of supply.
The UK broadband market is fiercely competitive, and at first glance dominated by a small number of large suppliers delivering standardised fixed line connectivity packages on a national basis.
Ofcom’s long awaited review of the UK broadband landscape offered both good and bad news for BT.
The regulator fell short of recommending the telco’s Openreach network infrastructure division be split into a separate company for now, but demanded that BT make it easier for rival internet providers to use its national network to deliver their own services to customers.
Extended Feature Article:
The software defined data centre may be the promised land for providers struggling to deliver cloud services cost effectively at scale, but remains in the early stage of development.
Imagine a data centre uncluttered by legacy, dedicated network, server and storage hardware consolidated to the point where every application, service or process which can be delivered as a virtualised software function has been moved onto next generation architecture.