Category: Integration Tax


  • We Tried AI on Our Integrations. Here’s What Happened.

    You probably already tried it. Somewhere in the last 18 months, someone on your team — or maybe you — pointed a large language model at an OSS/BSS integration problem. Maybe it was a NETCONF adapter for a Nokia 7750 SR. Maybe it was an SNMP trap receiver for a Calix GPON platform. Maybe it…

  • 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…