How Do YOU Buy??

When we're young, things are pretty simple.  Yes/no, hot/cold, love/hate.  As we get older, things get more complex, and therefore, our minds tend to start thinking in more complex ways as well.  This is NOT always a good thing.  Sometimes, because our thinking is complex, we tend to miss the simple answers. 

Let's use selling any piece of network gear as an example.  Companies spend thousands upon thousands of dollars doing market studies, constructing complex web sites, training sales personnel, designing and manning flashy trade show booths, building ad campaigns, writing white papers, subscribing to analysts' reports, and paying for studies that "prove" that their gear is better, faster, and more feature rich than that of their competitor. 

But, for all of the hoopla, customer buying behavior is actually alot like yours and mine (think about the last house you bought for instance).  It boils down to three simple laws (and I don't mean the three laws that Isaac Asimov wrote about in I Robot.)

1. Do I need/want it?  (Does it solve a problem, give me a new capability or help me save a ton of money - o.k., do I just plain have the desire to have it because my competitor has it...)
2. Can I afford it?  (The BIG question.)
3. Does it work?  (And will you be there if something does go wrong to get it fixed?)

So maybe it's time we all went "back to the future", and looked for the simple answers.  They might prove to be the best ones after all.

Are Carrier Backbones/Access Prepared?

With the spending squeeze we saw in carrier markets in 2009, it makes one wonder.  Are carrier networks prepared for 2010?  There are a number of reasons to think there might be a bandwidth shortage in some network areas rather than a bandwidth glut:

1. Leichtman Research Group recently stated that by the end of 2009, 46% or U.S. households will have at least one HDTV.
2. AT&T's unexplained halt in NY iPhone sales.  Was it a problem providing enough bandwith for these handy and bandwidth hungry devices?
3. Increasing FTTH installations and higher FTTH service uptake.
4. The video explosion - HDTV is just one piece.  YouTube, video conferencing (especially with the lastest airplane/terrorist incident), and emerging video-enabled applications are fast overtaking every other type of network traffic.  Cisco, in their Visual Networking Index, projects that:  By 2013, the sum of all forms of video (TV, VoD, Internet Video, and P2P) will exceed 90 percent of global consumer traffic.

The upshot of all of this, is that carriers need to start spending soon.  And that's good news for makers of equipment for carriers in 2010.

Is There a Place for Optical Switching?

Optical switches have been around a long time.  The technology is solid and it works.  Problem is, to date, there just hasn't been a big market for them.

But, now may be the time for optical switches.  Not, as they've been previously marketed as stand alone devices, but instead as components inside any number of other systems:

• ROADMs
• High end data center storage devices
• High density/capacity layer 2 switches
• Very large routing systems

Why?  The move to 100G makes optical switching one of the best ways to mesh backbone components of both carrier and data center network backbones.  No processing, little delay and minimal loss.  And, with the prices of optical switches falling rapidly, their time - as a component of larger devices - may be now.

What do you think?

The End of POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service)

Last night I had Christmas dinner with my neighbors.  Their mother's friend, a 94 year old ex miliary man commented to me that he has decided to cancel his land line and just use his cell phone for all his calls.  Most folks in the industry have realized that 20-somethings were going totally wireless, but I don't think many of us truly believed that many 65+'s were making the same move.  But, they are.

The end of POTS is upon us, and it's going to die an even quicker death due to the emerging competition between Apple (iPhone) and Google (Android) and 4G networks.  Just ask any 94 year old....