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Johna Til Johnson

Eye on the Carriers

By Johna Till Johnson

Johnson is president and chief research officer at Nemertes Research, an independent technology research firm. Reach her at johna@nemertes.com.

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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.
'Net traffic: Knowing what we don’t know
06/04/08
Determining how fast the Internet is growing is almost a parlor game among pundits these days. Part of the reason is simple practicality: Companies that depend for their livelihoods on supplying or using Internet infrastructure want to better understand growth trends so they can plan investments and growth curves accurately.
The waning of the WAN? Not so fast.
05/28/08
Many of my clients are thinking about how they can use Internet services to augment -- or even replace -- their WANs.
Be an ISP: internal services provider
05/22/08
A big buzzword these days for network and communications teams is "internal services provider." The idea is for the communications group to position itself as a provider of a range of services to the organization's users, typically with a chargeback mechanism in place.
A virtual workplace poses new IT challenges
05/15/08
One of the interesting things that's been happening over the past few years is that just as workforces have become less centralized, IT departments have gotten more so. The vast majority of companies I work with consider themselves virtual, meaning that employees work together on teams from widely distributed geographies. (Here's a hint: If you're in Detroit, your boss is in Dallas, and your colleagues are in Denver — you're in a virtual workplace.) Yet fewer IT teams are virtual in the same sense — in many cases IT teams are increasingly consolidated into a few central sites.
It's not your father's wireless anymore
05/08/08
Back in the day, wireless data was a neatly self-contained niche technology used by folks such as field force workers and logistics companies, but virtually ignored by everyone else.
Lessons from leaders in telecom management
05/01/08
Last week, I mentioned that telecom managers have my deepest respect. That’s easy to say, but in this case, I really did put my money where my mouth is: Last month, my company honored 10 of the top enterprise organizations that demonstrated significant leadership when it comes to deploying communications services.
Is your WAN a strategic asset?
04/24/08
In an alternate life, Rodney Dangerfield was probably a telecom manager: All too often, telecom folks get no respect. Users (and higher-ups) expect the infrastructure to simply work, while drooling over the flashy new apps, which they think of as “strategic assets.” Communications? That’s just the wires that keep the bits flowing.

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