Category: Technology

  • Threat of Disaggregated Network Equipment – Part 3

    Introduction: Disaggregation of IT equipment started with Facebook driving the Open Compute Project (OCP) to open up the design of compute servers. It then extended to bare metal switches and white boxes (such as those from Pica8), which are a huge threat to traditional switch/router equipment vendors.  The threat is now extended to transport/transmission equipment…

  • The $50 Million Smart City Challenge

    The $50 Million Smart City Challenge

    Will the U.S. Department of Transportation Smart City Challenge do for urban mobility what Google did for gigabit broadband? That is the $50M question as the U.S. Department of Transportation recently launched a contest that is challenging cities and counties (with populations of 250 to 850k) to find ways to use technology to improve mobility and…

  • Viodi View – 10/24/15

    Viodi View – 10/24/15

    It’s always a treat when a global organization brings their annual confab to my hometown, the capital of Silicon Valley. The ironic thing is that I spent more time looking for parking, than I did commuting to the recent WBA Global Congress. Parking is one of the issues that the Wireless Broadband Alliance hopes to address as…

  • A Power Grid with a Transit System

    A Power Grid with a Transit System

    Google’s real innovation in deploying Fiber-to-the-Home broadband networks had little to do with technology and a lot to do with improving the process for building physical plant. The technology to light the fiber was available when Google started its quest to offer a gigabit/second to residential customers. The big challenge was creating the fiber connection…

  • A Transition Step(s) to an Autonomous Transport Future

    A Transition Step(s) to an Autonomous Transport Future

    A relatively low-density city designed around the car. Public transportation service that meets its published schedule only 71% of the time, leading to customer satisfaction of only 65%, while the fare recovery is only 15% (passengers only pay 15% of the actual cost with government subsidies making up the difference). Although the above sounds like a description befitting most any U.S. post-World War…

  • 2015 Hot Interconnects Summary Part I – Oracle, Intel, and Facebook Talks

    2015 Hot Interconnects Summary Part I – Oracle, Intel, and Facebook Talks

    Introduction: In this first of a multi-part series on the excellent Hot Interconnects 2015 conference, held in Santa Clara, CA, August 26-28, 2015, we highlight presentations from three major IT infrastructure vendors: Oracle, Intel, and Facebook. A follow on article will examine Huawei’s open source activities, Deep Machine Learning and its networking applications (from Brocade Research),…