Eye on the Carriers

By Johna Till Johnson

What's an ISP? (That's not a trick question)

11/24/08

As President-elect Barack Obama begins fleshing out his agenda, one promising sign is that he considers Internet infrastructure to be key, judging from both his stated goals and the caliber of people he's asking to advise him on policy.

Communications personalities: Vive la difference!

11/20/08

One of my favorite advertising campaigns is the one from HSBC that spotlights how differently people can view the same things. You've probably seen it: Two photos side by side, each with a comment — then the same two photos, comments reversed.

Service-level agreements no longer enough

11/13/08

Longtime readers know I’m a fanatic about service-level agreements. I regularly advise clients about SLA best practices, negotiation and enforcement strategies. And we talk often about how to develop service-level management and monitoring infrastructure that ensures that carriers live up to their promises.

Tales of the multitasking mind

11/04/08

I've been thinking a lot about multitasking lately. Well, actually, I've been thinking about multitasking in 10-second segments, sandwiched in between replying to one of the several instant messages on my screen, writing this column, wrapping up a statistical analysis, and answering the door for the Mexican food delivery.

Ways to recession-proof your WAN

10/30/08

When it comes to the overall economic situation, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that the economic crisis shows all signs of subsiding into a garden-variety recession, rather than spiraling into a catastrophic crash. The bad news? Even a garden-variety recession can be pretty grim. Unless you're in one of those rare industries that thrives in recessions, that means it's batten-down-the-hatches time. In anticipation of the grimness, here are some tips for keeping your WAN spending under control.

Young workers today are fundamentally different? Nonsense.

10/22/08

It's trendy these days to describe the so-called "millennial" generation as somehow fundamentally different, especially in their almost instinctive use of technology.

A glimpse of the (networked) future

10/15/08

Charles Stross' vision of how networking -- the human kind and machine kind -- evolves is thought-provoking. His ideas on privacy and identity authentication alone are worth the price of admission. Like most great science fiction writers, he illustrates his ideas with real humans that you truly care about -- even as he's pushing the outer boundaries of what it means to be "human."

Telecom planning in a time of turmoil

10/09/08

It's gotten pretty hard to miss the financial news lately: September was the worst month for stocks in years, and October looks to surpass it. Despite the U.S. government's massive $800-billion bailout, the U.S. economy is still roiling, and Europe's is doing even worse.

How IPv6 is like the U.S. financial crisis

10/01/08

Not long ago, the powers-that-be detected an impending crisis. To resolve it, they rushed into action crafting a proposal that represented an unprecedented upheaval of existing infrastructure. On the grounds that "something needed to be done" to avert the crisis, they brushed aside objections that the upheaval was too convulsive and might nonetheless fail to address the underlying issues that had created the crisis in the first place. The financial bailout proposed by the Treasury Department? No. I'm talking about the creation of IPv6.

Calculating the cost of communicating

09/24/08

At a recent trade show, I happened to mention that some of my more forward-looking clients have created "communications calculators” that enable them to predict -- with a high degree of accuracy -- what the communications costs will be for moving or adding employees. Let's say a business unit owner wants to shift 5,000 employees from site A to site B -- how will that affect communications costs?

Is 'green IT' real? As real as your bottom line

09/18/08

A few weeks back, I wrote about the rise of green tech. Many folks have been asking me how real this trend is. I'm not sure what they mean by "real" (I'm a virtual gal, myself), but here's my best shot at an answer.

Innovation in the crucible of war

09/11/08

Last week I wrote about the importance of innovation. That got me thinking about one of my favorite topics: technology innovation in the military.

The innovation gap is real, all right

09/03/08

Recently Judy Estrin, former Cisco CTO and current Silicon Valley luminary, published a book called Closing the Innovation Gap. I haven’t read it (yet), but she reportedly argues that the United States has what she calls a “national innovation deficit” — specifically, a shortage of overall investment in science and engineering. According to a recent article, Google’s Vint Cerf, one of the primary inventors of the Internet, agrees.

The many modes of communication

08/27/08

Your E911 strategy, remote access policies and more depend on examining what "communication" means

Online profiling: DPI's bad, data mining's worse

08/20/08

Congress seems concerned about carrier deep packet inspection techniques, even though it essentially required them to adopt the technology back in the 1990s. Oh, and what about Google's e-mail search methods?

Buying bandwidth for fun and profit

08/13/08

You've got to hand it to the Canadians. Not only do they come up with great hockey, outstanding comedians and my friend Dave Keck (an up-and-coming science fiction writer) they've also generated one of the most innovative ideas ever for last-mile connectivity.

FCC right to tell Comcast: Hands off

08/06/08

Regular readers of this column know I take a nuanced view when it comes to net neutrality: On one hand, carriers shouldn’t be limiting or blocking traffic based on source, destination or traffic type, with the exception of traffic that clearly represents a hazard to the network or its users (such as malicious code attacking routers). On the other hand, providers have a right to charge differentiated rates for differentiated services, and users should choose whether they want best effort, guaranteed delivery or something in between. And providers should be able to charge heavy users rates commensurate with their usage.

Crafting a WAN? Consider the edges

07/31/08

Many IT executives consider the WAN to be a monolithic entity: a giant network that connects all the organization's sites across a common infrastructure.

The carrier commodity conundrum

07/22/08

We all know that these days, bandwidth is "free." Specifically, it's a commodity service whose cost is so low that it's no longer a significant component of telecom costs.

Building a new data center? Think WAN

07/16/08

Practically every company I talk with is consolidating data centers, constructing new ones, or both. These aren't the old "glass house" models of the 1980s and 1990s: They're next-generation designs with racks of blade servers, virtualized clusters and storage-area networks.

Don't be pooh-poohing social networking

07/10/08

A while back, I wrote about the concept of social networking. The upshot: Although the wisdom of crowds may be overhyped, the phenomenon of social networking isn't.

Going green, virtually speaking

06/30/08

Broadly speaking, there are two main reasons for companies to go green. The first is to reduce energy costs, thereby saving the company money. As one IT executive put it to me recently, "Green computing is all about saving greenbacks."

Does your phone make you smarter?

06/26/08

We've been hearing a lot lately about how communications technology reduces productivity and makes people stupider — mainly by interrupting people too often, in too many ways. Some studies have gone so far as to quantify the decline in productivity (25% to 30%) due to multitasking. These researchers imply that we'd all be better off turning off our phones, shutting down instant messaging and e-mail, and logging out of Facebook, MySpace and Linked-In. I think they're nuts.

With Amazon's Kindle, it's love at first byte

06/19/08

It's not that often electronics can change your life — but it happened to me a few days ago, when I bought an Amazon Kindle.

Navigating the wild world of wireless

06/12/08

Verizon's proposed $28 billion acquisition of privately held Alltel signals the start of hurricane season for wireless providers. And this season might just include the perfect storm: Technology shifts, consolidation and business-model changes are combining to reconfigure the world of wireless.

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