Three snippets have appeared in financial reports, in the past few weeks, which suggest that the IT backbone that supports operator networks could be slowing down significantly. In October, Spirent issued a profit warning for its test and measurement business, citing slowing operator spending, swiftly followed by similar words from Cisco, and now HPE has said server sales are down 31% in Q4. The Compute division, which is its largest and which houses the server business, declined 31% year-over-year, sitting at $2.59 billion – up 1% compared to the previous quarter. Senior VP and interim CFO Jeremy Cox said that “de-elongation and customer digestion had continued to be most prevalent in Compute,” and that “declining average unit prices from a…