Thoughts about emerging technology and trends in the networking industry.
In 2017, Google researchers published a foundational paper called "Attention Is All You Need," which introduced the transformer architecture that now powers ChatGPT, Claude and basically
24 Jan 2026 · 3 min read
A December episode of Laketec's Network Buzz with Mike Trappe and Phil Wightman: HPE Aruba Networking's new Central, what we brought back from AutoCon, how to make the business case for automation, where AI lowers the barrier, and Christmas ales.
17 Dec 2025 · 1 min read
The network automation market hit $15 billion this year. It'll double to $30 billion by 2028. Those numbers would've seemed absurd a decade ago
11 Dec 2025 · 5 min read
Phil Howard's Dissecting Popular IT Nerds, with Doug Edmunds of Summit Design and Engineering. A real SD-WAN deployment across North Carolina, why MPLS is not dead but is not the default either, and the line the episode is named after.
31 Oct 2025 · 3 min read
After spending some time working with model context protocol (MCP) servers plus other natural language AI interfaces that integrate with select network management and monitoring systems, I have
26 Oct 2025 · 3 min read
Mike Trappe and I had a great conversation on the Network Buzz, a Laketec Podcast. We took a fast, plain-English tour of AI for networking. I traced
12 Sep 2025 · 3 min read
The last week of June 2025 was pretty transformational for HPE networking. While most of us were still processing the stuff we learned at HPE Discover 2025 (June
7 Jul 2025 · 4 min read
Telemetry Now on SLED networking with Phil Gervasi and Laketec's Philip Wightman. E-Rate, one-person IT departments, why K-12 networks are not as simple as people assume, and the automation we were building for the summer refresh season.
18 Jun 2025 · 2 min read
Cables to Clouds had Scott Robohn on about leaving corporate to go independent. Tim and Chris asked me for the other side of the coin: eight years running WAN Dynamics, the exit, the burnout, and why I went back to a job.
13 Jun 2025 · 3 min read
Ethan Banks read my post on IRR and RPSL and wanted the long version. Jake Khuon, who ran RADb at Merit in the 1990s, joined us: what routing policy is, why you will not get routed without it in 2025, how the registries fit together, and how to get started.
30 May 2025 · 3 min read
I just spent a few days (May 13-16, 2025) at the Ohio Higher Education Computing Council (OHECC) conference and I could tell there's a shift
21 May 2025 · 4 min read
Several vendors at NFD37 described their products as air gapped. The delegates had questions. A Tech Field Day Podcast on what the term should mean, why "isolated" is the better word, and how to hold vendors to it.
15 Apr 2025 · 2 min read