A new survey from IHS found 82% of carriers have SDN already deployed or planned this year
A vast majority of the world’s largest mobile operators have software-defined networking plans on their books, according to a new report from IHS.
The findings of its latest “SDN Strategies: Global Service Provider Survey” found 82% of service providers have either deployed SDN, are in the process of deploying SDN or plan to evaluate SDN deployments this year. IHS said the survey included carriers garnering 49% of the world’s telecom capital expenses and 46% of telecom revenue.
IHS found the top reason for SDN investments was carriers looking to simplify and automate service provisioning, “which they believe will lead to service agility” and a quicker return on investment. IHS added that other top “domains for deployment” include cloud services offered to customers within and between data centers and access for businesses.
Despite the momentum, challenges remain. Carriers surveyed cited concerns over integrating SDN into legacy systems and fear that current technologies were still not mature enough for telecom deployments.
“The successful field trials and a few commercial deployments of SDN in the last year keep moving toward more commercial deployments in 2015, still mostly on a limited basis as operators put one or two use cases to the test under real-world conditions in their live networks,” said Michael Howard, senior research director for carrier networks at IHS. “Carriers are starting small with their SDN deployments and focusing on only parts of their network to ensure they can get the technology to work as intended. We see in the results of our SDN survey that though momentum is strong, it will be many years before we see bigger parts or a whole network that is controlled by SDN.”
IHS noted in a recent survey that 35% of telecom operators are planning to deploy network functions virtualization this year, yielding yet more evidence that despite its still nascent nature, carriers are moving rapidly toward NFV and virtualization platforms. More impressive, the survey found “all major operators are either now deploying NFV or plan to within the next few years,” according to Howard, with 48% of carriers planning to evaluate NFV by the end of the year.
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