Category: Blog


  • The Engineer Who Leaves Takes the Integration With Him

    There is a senior network architect at nearly every carrier I have worked with over the past 25 years. He — and it is almost always a he, in his mid-to-late fifties — has been with the company for a long time. He was there when the Nokia NMS was installed. He was there when…

  • The $180,000 Firmware Update

    Calix pushed a firmware update. Standard release cadence — nothing unusual. Somewhere in the release notes, buried in a changelog that nobody had time to read that week, was a line about a YANG model change for GPON OLTs.Six weeks later, a carrier I know well was cutting a check to their systems integrator for…

  • Service Management

    Service Management

    The ITIL Promise That AI Finally Makes Possible Continuing our exploration of operational frameworks that promised transformation but delivered complexity, let’s examine one of the most ambitious—and most frustrating—standards in enterprise IT: service management. While FCAPS gave us fault and performance management frameworks, ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) introduced the revolutionary concept of service management…

  • Why We Exist

    Why We Exist

    Breaking the Cycle of Network Operations Stagnation For decades, the telecommunications industry has operated under a simple, frustrating truth: certain problems are just “unsolvable.” Network operations teams have accepted that assurance is an afterthought, that correlation never really works, that integration costs too much and fails anyway, and that automation can maybe help with 10%…