What will we remember about this year in telecommunications?
And what does the landscape look like as we kick off 2023?
Greg Bryan (and his rapidly color-changing beard*) posed these questions to six TeleGeography experts in a rousing two-part episode of TeleGeography Explains the Internet. You might have caught the first episode earlier this week.
Another December, another opportunity to reflect on the year that was. And that's exactly what we're doing over on TeleGeography Explains the Internet.
This week, Greg Bryan kicks off the first of a two-part telecom year in review, welcoming experts Patrick Christian, Rob Schult, and Jon Hjembo to highlight the major trends they saw in their principal research areas.
Hello podcast listeners. It's Tuesday, which means there's a new episode of TeleGeography Explains the Internet hot off the press.
Our latest guest is Waheed Adam, Global Board Director of the Mobile Ecosystem Forum and Executive Chairperson at iTouch Messaging Service. He was a fantastic guest who brought a wealth of knowledge—and some really excellent stories—about mobile adoption as infrastructure in Africa.
Punch the play button below if you'd like to hear his chat with host Greg Bryan and Senior Research Manager Patrick Christian.
Welcome back, podcast listeners. We're thrilled to dive into a new season of telecom tech talk.
First, you might have noticed that we look a little different than when we were last in your headphones. That's because we did a little old-fashioned rebranding while on summer break. What was once the WAN Manager Podcast is now TeleGeography Explains the Internet.
Anyone in the WAN business—from the carrier or end-user side—knows that local access can present some of the biggest challenges in corporate networks.
There's a physical geography problem that's not easy to overcome. We're talking about pulling and maintaining wires to all corporate sites, which is especially challenging when customers need physical diversity and protection.
Wireless has long been a backup of last resort for many users, but 5G has presented the promise of relieving this pain point.
The TeleGeography team began benchmarking networks almost a decade ago. (Time flies when you're having fun!)
Back then, the big use case was making sure that carrier and customer were on the same page about how much MPLS and access prices had fallen over the life of a contract—and how far prices would probably fall in the next several years.
Our readers likely know about NaaS: cloud-based network architecture that allows a WAN manager to stitch together different enterprise network components in a self-service, automated way.
At the WAN Manager Podcast, we've been watching the ways in which NaaS has emerged as specific products/solutions from vendors, as well as how it integrates with existing WAN strategies from the enterprise side.
Here's a hot take: the networking hype cycle has moved on from SD-WAN in favor of SASE and now SSE.
Two years ago—when the world shut down—WAN managers had to scramble to accommodate massive changes. Offices transitioned to remote work and navigated brand new traffic patterns.
Our guest on this week's WAN Manager Podcast navigated the added challenge of running a network within the healthcare industry, where business needs were changing in real-time.
We've discussed the ways in which the WAN is moving away from private networks and MPLS in favor of reliance on the public internet. Not to mention the costs and benefits of that evolution.
Although it's certainly always been the case that WAN managers must stay on top of internet performance and outages, this is increasingly crucial in the internet-first WAN era in which we find ourselves.
