Apr 19, 2022
SASE Isn't Revolutionary. It's Evolutionary.
Here's a hot take: the networking hype cycle has moved on from SD-WAN in favor of SASE and now SSE.
Apr 13, 2022
Meet the Cellcos Serving Rural America: Part 1
The U.S. mobile market is notoriously ultra-competitive, and household names like Sprint aren't the only ones to have been squeezed out in recent years.
Since 2020, Verizon Wireless has snapped up regional players such as Chat Mobility, Bluegrass Cellular, Triangle Mobile, and Chariton Valley Communications.
Tellingly, all four operators were participants in the telecom giant’s “LTE in Rural America” program, which leased 700MHz of spectrum to regional players in areas where Verizon had no intention of deploying infrastructure. After going live in 2010, the project was completed in October 2015, when all 21 participants were confirmed to be operational.
At the program’s peak, operators collectively covered more than 2.7 million people across 169 rural counties in 15 states.
Despite Verizon’s low-key takeover spree, dozens of smaller players continue to thrive in the U.S. This week we take a deep dive into the regional cellular scene and uncover the cellcos serving rural America.
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.
After a two-year hiatus, the WAN Summit is back in Germany and making its grand return to a live, in-person format.
The new event, WAN Summit Düsseldorf, will revolve around four major themes: SD-WAN, cloud services, underlay networks, and SASE.
Apr 5, 2022
How Global Events Impact the Internet
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.
Apr 4, 2022
Two New Maps, Lots of New Cables
It's the announcement you've been waiting for. And we've made it twice as nice, because not only is our 2022 Submarine Cable Map here—but so is our brand new Africa Telecommunications Map.
Sponsored by the team at Telecom Egypt, these designs reveal new cables, landing stations, construction stats, international bandwidth figures, and lots more. And you can grab copies for your wall over in our map store.
Mar 31, 2022
Can a Park Bench Boost 5G?
As India’s long-awaited 5G deployment draws nearer, a new pilot program may prompt you to look at ordinary objects—like lampposts, mailboxes, and park benches—much differently.
This program will equip street furniture with small cell networks across four different locations: Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi, Bengaluru Metro Rail Corporation, Kandla Port in Gujarat, and Bhopal city.
Mar 30, 2022
Ukrainian Telcos: Communicating Through the Conflict
We recently took a look at Ukrainian operators and their relative positions in the country’s telecom market.
As the Russian invasion continues, we turn our attention to the efforts of Ukrainian telcos, who are attempting to keep communications online under the most difficult circumstances.
Recent months have seen an unprecedented level of M&A activity across Asia’s mobile markets, with eye-catching deals in Thailand, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Indonesia.
Today we examine the players reshaping the Asian telecom landscape.
Mar 28, 2022
SD-WAN's Shift to Security
While the key SD-WAN transformation use case was built around network cost and resiliency, its focus is now shifting to security.
Enterprises have moved to more internet connectivity. Traffic patterns have moved away from on-premise data centers to neutral colo facilities or cloud service providers/hyperscalers. And over the past two years, edge access has moved out of the corporate site—to home and remote connections.
These forces changed how enterprises approach network security, and SD-WAN vendors have responded with new partnerships and feature sets.
This review looks at enterprise security trends and how SD-WAN vendors have adapted to accommodate security needs.
