The quiet progress of Network Functions Virtualisation

Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) is a term less often heard these days.

Yet the technology framework that kickstarted a decade of network transformation by the telecom operators continues to progress.

Bruno Chatras

The working body specifying NFV, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute's (ETSI) Industry Specification Group (ISG) Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV), is working on the latest releases of the architecture.

The releases add AI and machine learning, intent-based management, power savings, and virtual radio access network (VRAN) support.

ETSI is also shortening the time between NFV releases.

“NFV is quite a simple concept but turning the concept into reality in service providers’ networks is challenging,” says Bruno Chatras, ETSI’s ISG NFV Chairman and senior standardisation manager at Orange Innovation. “There are many hidden issues, and the more you deploy NFV solutions, the more issues you find that need to be addressed via standardisation.”

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Can a think tank tackle telecoms innovation deficit?

The Telecom Ecosystem Group (TEG) will publish shortly its final paper that concludes two years of industry discussion on ways to spur innovation in telecommunications.

The paper, entitled Addressing the Telecom Innovation Deficit, says telcos have lost much of their influence in shaping the technologies on which they depend.

Source: Telecom Ecosystem Group

“They have become ageing monocultures; disruptive innovators have left the industry and innovation is outsourced,” says the report.

The TEG has held three colloquiums and numerous discussion groups soliciting views from experienced individuals across the industry during the two years.

The latest paper names eight authors but many more contributed to the document and its recommendations.

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Rebooting telecom innovation

Last summer several individuals, including representatives from Telefonica and Deutsche Telekom, published a White Paper on the need to boost innovation in the telecom industry.

Don Clarke

Six months and many conversations later, the group published its second paper, this time focussing on the communications service providers (CSPs), vendors and the investor community.

The paper, entitled Developing a Code of Conduct Framework for the Telecom Ecosystem, highlights four areas to spur innovation: Funding, Innovation Processes, Competition and Procurement.

The code-of-conduct paper offers guidelines as to how CSPs can work with vendors, especially small and medium-sized ones that lack the resources of the larger established vendors.

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Books 2020: Part III

Gazettabyte asked industry figures to pick their reads during last year. In the final post - Part III - Alexis Bjorlin and Don Clarke choose theirs.

Alexis Bjorlin, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Optical Systems Division, Broadcom

In 1996, during my first semester as a graduate student in Santa Barbara, I both lost myself and found companionship in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s epic saga, One Hundred Years of Solitude. This work of magical realism has become my comparand against which all other works of fiction are measured.

In 2020, I revisited the town of Macondo and the Buendia family, and discovered a whole new world, offering striking comparisons to our current history, replete with juxtaposed conservative and progressive narratives, luring me into a suspension of disbelief to enjoy the richness of the family and their century-long story unfolding.

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Telecoms' innovation problem and its wider cost

Imagine how useful 3D video calls would have been this last year.

The technologies needed - a light field display and digital compression techniques to send the resulting data across a network - do exist but practical holographic systems for communication remain years off.

Source: Accelerating Innovation in the Telecommunications Arena

But this is just the sort of application that telcos should be pursuing to benefit their businesses.

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What the cable operators are planning for NFV and SDN

Cable operators may be quieter than the telecom operators about network functions virtualisation (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN) but what they are planning is no less ambitious.

Cable operators are working on adding wireless to their fixed access networks using NFV and SDN technologies.

Don Clarke“Cable operators are now every bit as informed about NFV and SDN as the telcos are, but they are not out there talking too much about it,” says Don Clarke, principal architect for network technologies at CableLabs, the R&D organisation serving the cable operators.

Clarke is well placed to comment. While at BT, he initiated the industry collaboration on NFV and edited the original white paper which introduced the NFV concept and outlined the operators’ vision for NFV. 

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Telcos eye servers & software to meet networking needs

• The Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) initiative aims to use common servers for networking functions
• The initiative promises to be industry disruptive

"The sheer massive [server] volumes is generating an innovation dynamic that is far beyond what we would expect to see in networking"

Don Clarke, NFV

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