The Rethink Blog

A great deal of attention is being paid to 5G RAN and transport. This makes sense because the greenfield buildout of small cell sites is will be significant.  The shorter range of 5G will drive the “densification” of small cell sites.  The Small Cell Forum estimates that the number of cell sites will grow from

As 2019 winds down, Volta has been asked several times about our thoughts on what was significant in 2019 and our predictions for 2020. In 2019, we saw the tipping point in service providers moving to open networking from legacy infrastructure. The key was the availability of carrier-grade switching ASICs from vendors like Broadcom. A

On December 10, Volta and Fujitsu co-sponsored a webinar hosted by IHS Markit featuring Heidi Adams, Executive Director, Network Infrastructure Research.  Our topic was Virtual Routing in 5G Transport.  Attendees received a special report authored by Heidi. If you missed it, you watch it on-demand here and download the report, the slides and several other

Volta’s CEO, Dean Bogdanovic, presented at IETF 106 in Singapore on November 20.  His presentation addressed the evolution of network automation and programmability. He discussed where software should run and what should run on network hardware.  The presentation covered traffic engineering optimization and issues around carrier grade automation. Click on the image to watch the

Volta is gearing up for the TIP Summit next week in Amsterdam on November 13 and 14.  This will a great opportunity to engage with members of a thriving collaborative community. The Telecom Infra Project (TIP) has over “500 Member organizations, including operators, technology providers, developers, integrators, startups, and a range of other entities inside

We don’t actually have a crystal ball, but Volta seems to have a good track record in identifying trends. Last week, there was a spate of articles validating things that we have been saying for some time. Last April we did a webinar with Light Reading and pointed out that 4G was about connecting consumers

In carrier networks, the appliance model is giving way to a disaggregated model. Traditionally, functions like routing were implemented in a tightly coupled hardware and software bundle. Routing vendors could ensure the proper operation of their system because they controlled the entire network element. They even developed their own switching ASICs for their line cards.

Server virtualization gained interest as a way to optimize costs. The processing capacity of servers had grown to a point where it was common to see very low utilization levels. Thus, there was enough processing available to add a hypervisor and run multiple workloads on a single server. IT departments could point to better server

In server virtualization, the key is thinking of an application as a workload.  A server with a hypervisor can run multiple, independent workloads.  This allows for better utilization of the server and much greater flexibility, agility, and responsiveness in managing workloads. In routing, we have seen many attempts to run multiple control plane workloads trying

The hypervisor was a technology that could be added to the existing mix that made everything work better.  The applications, the OS and hardware were all the same after the hypervisor was introduced into the mix. As a result, the focus could be on prioritizing what workloads to virtualize enabling a gradual introduction of the