Tellabs Blog

On Sunday we celebrated the retirement of Tellabs co-founder and chairman, Michael J. Birck.  About 400 people came to Naperville from far and wide to wish Mike well.

Mike founded Tellabs in 1975. The company started out with $110,000 raised by the founders and a $50,000 loan from a local bank. Most of the founders took no salary the first year.

My conversations with service providers lead me to believe that OTN switching technology will begin increasing in metro network deployments, in order to further transport efficiency. In fact, we’re testing our new OTN upgrade for the Tellabs 7100 series in customer labs today.

While LTE smartphones drive growth in small cell deployments, the enthusiasm among ecosystem stakeholders is tempered by significant challenges with the new technology. Infonetics Research has pointed out that operators are having many operational and financial challenges with the new business model. Based on operator feedback, it seems that weak operational procedures as well as deficient tools and technologies are the most critical pain points.

Carrier Ethernet has been around for quite a while, and formally since the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) created the UNI specifications. In fact, the UNI Abstract Test Suite – MEF 9 – has been around since 2004! These specifications provided industry agreed upon interface requirements between the users and the service provider.

Adoption of cloud services is on the rise. IDC predicts that public IT cloud services will grow 5 times faster than the overall IT industry from 2012 to 2016. And Cisco projects that cloud data center (DC) workloads will exceed traditional DC workloads for the first time by 2014.