Most of the articles I write are about general communications industry issues. For a change, I have put together a short description of the services that my company and my colleagues at Predictable Network Solutions Ltd (PNSol) jointly offer.

A hot topic in telecoms at the moment is ‘software-defined networking’ (SDN). This term covers a range of technologies that put networks under the control of centralised management software. But what if SDN misses the point of why broadband networks exist in the first place?

For late May, the weather is unusually dull and overcast. But then again the year 2016 has been a dark one. You run your fingers back and forth over the grain of the hardwood boardroom table. A few tiny drops of your own sweat glisten in the grooves, reflecting back the fierce fluorescent lighting. The […]

Imagine for a moment you’re standing in a remote jungle in the tropics. Around you there are thousands of swaying trees, flapping birds and mildly worrying creepy crawlies. You venture forth, carefully noting the shapes and colours of each species you encounter.

In “Net Neutrality: Discrimination, Competition, and Innovation in the UK and US”, Alissa Cooper and Ian Brown explore the relationship between two broadband regulatory regimes and their practical outcomes. The paper is of (paradoxical) interest as it (unintentionally) demonstrates how policy is being made without sufficient understanding of packet network performance.

The issue of quality in networks has been long being troublesome, as the underlying science of ‘QoS’ has fallen short of what we need. We have now filled in a significant part of the missing mathematical foundations. The culmination of that work is the ∆Q framework.

What is ‘quality arbitrage’? When networks went from circuits to packets, they gained a huge increase in efficiency. This was done by sharing the transmission resource more intensively through ‘statistical multiplexing’. At present, all telcos are holding the risks of statistical multiplexing without extracting the corresponding quality of experience (QoE) value. This is because the very […]

∆Q is not only a breakthrough in terms of the science of network performance. It also is transformational to capital and operational costs. Here is one case study from BT Operate (from 2012) to illustrate. If you want to make similar large savings, learn how by coming to my ∆Q workshop in San Francisco next week.

In a previous article, I discussed how telecoms is facing a growing complexity crisis. To resolve this crisis, a new approach is required. Here I explore how that complexity can be tamed.

The telecoms industry is facing a systemic problem of high operational complexity and excessive cost. We take a look at the root causes, and how to tackle them.