Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly Reality Check column where C-level executives and advisory firms from across the mobile industry share unique insights and experiences.
In most industries, every now and then, something comes along that has the capacity to rewrite the rules and change the landscape completely. We’ve seen it plenty of times in telecoms: the rise of mobile, the Internet explosion, the smartphone revolution. In the last year, the change capturing the most industry attention was NFV, aka network function virtualization — much less visible to consumers, but still capable of making a major impact on their service delivery.
One remarkable thing about NFV is the impact it had on another hot topic — software-defined networking. In some ways NFV has helped make sense of SDN, which had been running the risk of being all hype but no deployment.
But there is a fundamental shift underpinning the hype. Indeed, one could argue that the “F” in NFV is as much about “flexibility” as it is about functions, because NFV is opening up an era where operators will have more choice and freedom to mix and match and choose software vendors to deliver network functions — regardless of hardware supplier — than ever before.
The rise of NFV is giving operators globally a golden opportunity to radically change how current mobile networks transform to data-centric LTE networks. NFV severs the link between a mobile operator’s services and its vendor hardware — giving operators the ability break out from a single supplier delivering hardware-based network equipment and services and realize the cost savings of a multivendor environment.
And one of the most remarkable things about this wave of change is that it is built on established and deployed technology. In the IT industry, virtualization is a mature and proven technology that has been used to dramatically lower the cost structure of building and maintaining data centers. Virtualization helps maximize return on investment and get the most out of existing infrastructure and hardware.
Previously, virtualization had made relatively little impact on the telecoms world, but that is rapidly changing. The European Telecommunications Standards Institute’s NFV initiative has galvanized the mobile industry and focused operators and vendors alike on the need to leverage virtualization in order to build the next generation core network.
What operators don’t know is that there are IMS applications and core network solutions that are fully virtualized and are carrying live commercial traffic. There are also fully virtualized portfolios of software products that can run on industry standard COTS servers.
This runs counter to the mistaken belief in the mobile industry that NFV progress is hindered by a lack of vendor readiness and technology maturity. In our case, that is simply not true, but in any case it misses the point of NFV entirely. In an NFV world, operators do not have to wait for their current hardware vendor to be ready with a software-based solution — they can deploy network functions on software from any vendor on industry standards servers. NFV is a true software-as-a-service environment that gives operators the chance to act now, and not wait for their traditional hardware vendor of choice to be ready.
Forward thinking service providers have predicted and have now proven how NFV can dramatically reduce network complexity and cost while making it easier to build capacity and add flexibility to a network.
For example, a fault in an NFV environment can be more easily bypassed — traffic switched to another blade or server — than is the case in the physical hardware world; and an operator no longer requires separate systems to run its back office systems as spare server capacity in quiet periods for network traffic, such as overnight, can be used to run functions such as billing.
But as well as potentially making it easier to source, operate, manage and maintain the network, NFV also makes it far easier to roll out new services across the network — in fact a survey of mobile operators by analysts at Heavy Reading highlighted this as the most critical feature driving NFV implementation.
NFV’s capability to power new services, drive down costs and increase network flexibility is available today. Virtualization is not virtually here; it is actually here and deployed — and go-ahead operators are already realizing the benefits.
Pardeep Kohli is a wireless industry veteran with 18 years of experience. As co-founder, president and CEO, Kohli led Spatial Wireless, the mobile next-generation networking market leader, to broad success across the U.S. market. Following the acquisition by Alcatel, as SVP of the Mobile NGN business, he led the continued expansion and success of the Spatial Wireless product across the global market place. Kohli has worked in multiple roles at NEC America, DSC, Alcatel and PacBell. While at PacBell, Kohli participated in the technology selection and network implementation of the first large U.S. GSM network.
