🔙 Throwback Thursday for 2024-09-05
From Nortel Networks to Verizon Cloud: A journey through telecom evolution, cloud computing, and industry giants.
My early career in the late 1990s was in telecommunications. I worked for a company called Nortel Networks before I pivoted to become a global road warrior / consultant during the .com boom.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKjAMxzdrHw
Back then a “cloud” on a network diagram was often meant to depict the Sprint frame relay network. Times have changed a bit since then and “cloud computing” became “the cloud” we know today.
Over the years, traditional telecom wireline business (copper telephone lines) fell into a less desirable category as mobile, broadband, high speed fiber optics networks, and cloud computing took hold of investor attention.
If you remember AT&T at SXSW 2009, the mobile carrier was trying but was unable to keep up with all the Internet connected mobile devices. The following year the lessons learned from many thousands of mobile phones trying to reach the Internet in one small city went into motion for SXSW 2010 using many COWs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fQAEd3fjhY
Of course, AT&T wasn’t the only mobile carrier. There was also Verizon.
For example, if you were to look at my writing back in 2010, you might have associated Verizon with cutting edge technology. You might have even considered Verizon to be a developer oriented company.
In fact, Verizon got into the cloud business in 2011. Verizon Cloud was born!
https://www.verizon.com/about/news/press-releases/verizon-completes-terremark-acquisition
So too did AT&T have cloud ambitions, but that’s for another Throwback Thursday. We’ll get there.
However, cloud computing had been pioneered at Amazon, Google, and Microsoft for over a decade and by 2017, Verizon got out of the cloud computing business it had acquired in 2011.
https://www.techmeme.com/170503/p12#a170503p12
Oh, and remember Sprint and that version of the original “cloud”?
Well, $26B later in 2020 dollars…
https://www.t-mobile.com/news/un-carrier/t-mobile-sprint-one-company
Also, the cloud within the US market is now firmly associated with companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, IBM, and a growing number of niche providers from REITs to XaaS players.
Still, within the US market, the largest names associated with telecom became AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile.
However, there were many other telecom brands that were operating as well but far below the size of AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile.
Fast forward to the present… What old is what’s new again.
https://www.techmeme.com/240905/p12#a240905p12
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