Victor Blake

Victor Blake received his bachelor's degree in computer engineering technology from Rochester Institute of Technology and Master's from Syracuse University. He is an experienced strategist, architect and operations engineer. Victor has also taught undergraduate and graduate courses at both RIT and Syracuse University. He is a standards member of SCTE and corporate member of IEEE Standards Association, as well as a member of OSA, SPIE and CTAM. Contact him on his website, Network Strategy.

Articles by Victor Blake

• Is Amazon a telecom operator?

  Tuesday, April 01, 2014

  ​At first glance, Amazon doesn't appear to be in the telecommunications business. The company looks like an online retailer. But Amazon's fastest-growing and most profitable businesses are not margins on books, CDs, DVDs or other material goods.

• Can computer viruses be helpful?

  Tuesday, March 11, 2014

  As counterintuitive as it may seem, computer viruses may be a good thing. Sure, getting a virus on your computer right when you need to do some critical task isn't good. But computer viruses may have an important role to play in the long-term quality and reliability — the "health" — of computers, communications systems and eventually all technology-enabled "things."

• Storm brewing? Cloud computing comes with certain risks

  Monday, February 10, 2014

  Cloud services offer a great opportunity to selectively buy and use the services we need while leaving the details of operations and support to experts. But what will happen when consumers or businesses come to rely upon a cloud service that is later shut down?

• Net neutrality: Free market will self‑regulate

  Tuesday, January 21, 2014

  A federal appeals court has made it clear that the FCC cannot regulate the carriage of traffic on the Internet for operators which the FCC itself deems are not common carriers. Of course, there is nothing preventing the FCC from declaring that Internet service providers are common carriers. If they did so, they could presumably go on to regulate carriage include not only policies (like "neutrality") but also pricing, bundling and other regulation.

• Network engineers may truly be plumbers soon

  Monday, January 06, 2014

  I used to joke with my colleagues and staff that network engineers are plumbers. Nobody cares about plumbing in a house ... until it doesn't work. When the plumbing backs up then its everyone's business. Such is the fate of network engineers, whose work is essential to the Internet and telecom networks, but is also thought to be mundane to outsiders. Soon we will be one step closer to being real plumbers with liquid-core optical fiber.

• Telecom protectionism: What goes around comes around

  Monday, December 09, 2013

  Ethernet and the Internet — perhaps America's greatest inventions — have driven global telecommunications standards, and subsequently economic development, more than any other innovation. The reach of the Internet is so broad that irrespective of political, social or economic alliance or opposition to the United States, enemies and friends alike have adopted the Internet both for consumers and as the foundation for all global telecommunications. Despite all of this global expansion, some U.S. telecom companies have used national security concerns to entice the U.S. government to restrict access to certain products from Chinese companies. And now this tactic is coming back to bite them.

• The real economics behind Internet access in America

  Wednesday, November 20, 2013

  In our competitive world, journalists and politicians have taken it upon themselves to explain, in poorly informed terms, ​why "broadband" is "more expensive in the U.S." Sadly, even the U.S. government has done a better job of explaining what some of the challenges are in the FCC's annual Broadband Progress Report. The cost of providing a service may involve any number of factors including competition, demand and other economic factors.

• Making local access more accessible

  Monday, November 04, 2013

  ​In recent years, we've seen the evolution of emergency systems to include both forward and reverse services for cellular networks and subscribers. Clearly mobile networks (when combined across all of the mobile service providers) are more geographically ubiquitous than any fixed-access network alone can be.

• A new path for SDN: Routing and switches are not commodities

  Monday, October 21, 2013

  During my tenure at a large service provider, someone in the purchasing department decided that all network equipment purchases were commodities to be bid out like the purchasing of pencils, pens and paper. Suffice it to say that even fiber-optic cables were not then commodities, and certainly not IP routers and switches.