Is four nines the new five nines?

When my phone stopped working last month during the latest calamitous network outage to hit the US, I assumed it was that pesky Amazon cloud POP in North Virginia playing up again. After all, it was AWS’s VA data centre that triggered three of the last big network failures in North America. But no! This time it was Verizon’s telecommunications network that was the root cause. Get ready for more of this kind of thing. The industry’s rapid pivot from bespoke hardware to software-first telecom architectures—dominated by AI, Cloud-Native Network Functions, Kubernetes, Open RAN, 5G-Advanced network slicing—is justifiably lauded for its promise to reduce OPEX, improve utilization, and streamline operations at scale. But there is a price to be paid for this pace of change. The software revolution is operating at the absolute bleeding edge of technology, introducing a level of complexity into carrier networks previously seen only in nuclear submarines and ASML’s extreme ultraviolet lithography chimaera.

[Steve Saunders is a British-born communications analyst, investor and digital media entrepreneur with a career spanning decades.]