SÃO PAULO — This year’s Futurecom trade show was bigger than last year’s event with a total of 350 brands in attendance and an expected 15,000 attendees. Two major topics headlined this year Futurecom event: What will happen to Brazilian mobile operator Oi (check out full story here); and what to make of the growing network function virtualization trend, though that mainly came from vendors in attendance.
Others takeaways include:
- American Movil’s mobile unit Claro did not make a keynote presentation, which was noticeable as Telefonica’s Vivo, Oi, TIM, Telecom Italia and GVT all made presentations.
- During the opening session, a speech by telecom minister Paulo Bernardo sounded like a farewell address. Indeed, Brazil has presidential elections scheduled for Oct. 26.
- Small cells weren’t as big a topic this year as they were in 2013; but NFV and software-defined networking garnered significant attention, mostly in speeches by vendors.
- Big data, “Internet of Things” and machine-to-machine were on the agenda.
NFV hype
A reduction of costs and time-to-market are two main proposition values associated with the use of NFV.
“The mobile network is evolving to incorporate small cells, [DAS], remote radio heads and Wi-Fi, and though the macrocell layer still does the heavy lifting when it comes to traffic handling, the backhaul network behind all this is becoming increasingly complex,” Richard Webb, directing analyst for mobile backhaul and small cells at Infonetics Research, recently noted in a statement. “Operators are looking at [SDN] and [NFV] solutions to provide greater backhaul flexibility and cost-savings.”
Christopher Williams, head of global marketing at Amdocs, told RCR Wireless News in a video interview that reducing the cost of building networks and bring products to the market faster are the main benefits of NFV adoption.
“NFV talks about moving from an environment that was dominated by a hardware perspective and moving it to software network architecture. There is a significant aspect on reducing [capital expenditures] and every time you reduce capex you are able to redirect these funds to another investment,” Williams noted. “The second point is that products can be brought to the market in very fast time, from months to days or weeks. If you think of emerging [over-the-top] competitors, their models have been to introduce news services in a very rapid term,” added Williams, highlighting that NFV could be an instrument for telecom operators to better compete with OTT players.
The concept of NFV began about two years ago and has recently been discussed by a number of carriers.
“NFV is very much driven by carriers themselves and there’s a huge interest from carriers,” explained Werner Schaefer, VP for Hewlett-Packard’s NFV business. “But when we talk about the adoption as taking the technology into the network, we are involved in two dozen proof of concepts around the world.”
As Schaefer said, about 25 companies are currently analyzing NFV, including working on PoCs. In Latin America, Schaeger cited large telecom operators such as Telefonica, Telecom Italia and America Movil as playing a role in NFV. Indeed, RAD’s Ilan Tevet also named America Movil as a carrier looking at NFV.
However, all executives interviewed by RCR Wireless News noted that NFV is still in its infancy and will take time to gain adoption.
“We believe that there are a lot of opportunities for services providers to reach by virtualization,” Tevet explained. “Virtualization will be a big change because it will allow carriers to launch services by a click of a mouse. … It is driven by carriers because they understand the value for them. That is why I believe NFV will go faster than other technologies.”
The adoption of NFV is also expected to impact network hardware providers. Fabio Hashimoto, manager of software services at Promonlogicalis, believes that new players will appear around growth in the need for virtualized servers. In his opinion, NFV can change the whole ecosystem. “It’s impossible to say for sure, but the same way the market has adopted itself for server virtualization technology, it will happen with NFV.”
Hashimoto noted that NFV should use the same concepts that have been used to virtualize servers, routers and other complex network functions.
Wondering what’s going on in Latin America? Why don’t you follow me on Twitter? Also check out all of RCR Wireless News’ Latin American content.
