CBRS: The 3.5 GHz Wireless Revival

At trade shows it is now common for scheduled talks occur on the show floor. At the year’s SCTE-ISBE Cable-Tec Expo in Atlanta Ga, on Tues., Oct 23, the floor-based Innovation Theater featured execs from ARRIS and ARRIS subsidiary Ruckus Wireless for a discussion of 3.5 GHz band Citizens Band Radio Service (CBRS). Expo organizers named this session “CBRS: The Future is Here.” And this future...
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Does Network Virtualization Make Your Head Spin?

For nearly two decades, I’ve tracked trends at the SCTE-ISBE Cable-Tec Expo. This year’s event in Atlanta provided many chances to do so, including the Light Reading breakfast session on “Virtualizing the Cable Architecture.” My high-level takeaway from this Oct 23 gathering: Virtualization is in a holding pattern, at least as far as cable is concerned. It is not surprising that an industry once...
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A Tale of Two (or more) DevOps Reports

A recent email from IT automation software company Puppet plugged its 2018 State of DevOps Report. Because this topic is important to many companies I write for (and because I read last year’s report), I downloaded a copy. A few things stood out. First, authorship. Puppet and machine-data software company Splunk present this year’s report. There are three authors from Puppet and one from...
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CenturyLink Hosts RVA Tech on Tap

“No drink, no ink” – that’s the classic line of an old-school journalist meeting a source at the local bar. So full disclosure up front: I did have a beer at the RVA Tech on Tap gathering on Aug 16, at the Three Notch’d Brewing Co and Collab House. But I paid $10 to attend. That makes my drink mostly a wash between me and the event’s sponsor, CenturyLink. CenturyLink is still interesting...
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Intel Pitches Optane for Content Delivery

The Content Delivery Summit, hosted by StreamingMedia.com in New York City on May 7, provided a stage for chip maker Intel to discuss a storage technology that it developed several years ago with Micron and later branded as Optane. The pitch was a head-turner for a few reasons. First, let’s underscore a point. Intel was talking memory and storage, not micro-processing or CPUs, with which...
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Cable-Tec Expo: A Mile High and 18 Years Deep

This year’s SCTE•ISBE’s Cable-Tec Expo in Denver was my 18th. To old-timers, that still makes me a rookie. Yes, the cable industry can be tight-knit and self-referential. But it is also welcoming, open to change and attentive to innovation. And mile-high Denver was the place to go this fall to tap into the industry’s forward-looking execs. Joining the big blue bear at the Denver Convention...
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