Why aren’t SDN/NFV Widely Deployed Yet?

In the last five years, virtualization has been on top of mind in the telecom industry. However, technologies like SDN and NFV, born to be the future in networking, are not being deployed with the expected rhythm. There are several reasons for this to be happening. Most of them are related to the challenges CSPs face when with virtualization in the network domain.

Symphonica Service Orchestrator is Intraway’s future-proof SOM platform that was designed to fulfill any service and technology from any vendor – including NFV and SDN based services. With it, you can implement many use cases in the blink of an eye.

Everybody Finds Benefits on Virtualization

The TELECOMS.COM INTELLIGENCE ANNUAL INDUSTRY SURVEY 2018 shows that more than 60% think that virtual solutions will reduce OPEX. Also, more than half of the survey’s participants point that it will improve network performance and reliability and will also allow for network/service agility. The study also reflects that more than 75% of all CSPs find deploying NFV very important.

So, why is this promising technology not spreading as fast as others? Here are the top pains CSPs face when planning the adoption of NFV and SDN.

Marrying the Cloud With Traditional Infrastructure

In the last two decades, all the CSPs have been building their networks with legacy physical equipment. Most of this vast infrastructure will not support the new emerging technology. Planning a smooth evolution and coexistence of legacy equipment with new cloud-based virtualized networks represents a big challenge. Even more when less-complex platforms have not been moved to the cloud yet. This transition will show a mid-term to long-term marriage between the virtual and the physical infrastructure. Meanwhile, we will witness continuous efforts to decouple as much as possible the physical layers from logical layers.

No Consensus on an Established Standard

During the last years, we’ve heard of several open source initiatives such as such as ODL, ONOS, OPNFV, and CORD among others. None of them where massively adopted to consider it as the industry standard. Moreover, no standards organization (like ETSI, MEF or TMForum) was strong enough on promoting and establishing a standard. It seems that, instead of helping set another constraint as now, “there are too many standards to choose from.” Situations like this tend to stop many CSPs from moving forward until the big ones establish a de-facto standard. However, it seems that ONAP (Open Network Automation Platform) is being called to fill that gap finally. On the other hand, Cable Labs seems to have woken up and has recently created a brand new project called SNAPS.

Big Promises, High Investment but Unsure Return

Even when studies reveal that SDN/NFV should cut costs, reduction on OPEX and CAPEX isn’t the primary driver for its deployment. CSPs usually point to a reduced time-to-market, network optimization and new services offering as strong drivers for an implemented virtualized solution. The problem with these drivers is that it may be difficult to monetize them. Is even more complicated to create solid business cases around them to justify the investment. It’s true that those big promises can turn into real benefits but to make this happen there’s a master key to open the treasure chest: a High Performance and Flexible Service Orchestration.

The Real Big Challenge: Management & Orchestration

We can all do more in-depth research and understand about NFV MANO main functional blocks. The big challenge around it isn’t related to its concepts. The importance is how to evolve existing OSS platforms to embrace and fulfill NFV Management and Orchestration needs. And the key is to achieve all this without forcing CSPs to have different solutions for different services. An appropriate solution must be efficient at managing network assets to fulfill business needs. But, at the same time, the solution should also be able to monitor virtual network components on a real-time basis to dynamically allocate resources depending on fast-changing conditions.

Symphonica Service Orchestrator is Intraway’s future-proof SOM platform that was designed to fulfill any service and technology from any vendor – including NFV and SDN based services. With it, you can implement many use cases in the blink of an eye.