Month: December 2014

Does NFV Signal the End of “Speeds & Feeds” Product Comparisons?

by , posted in Net Transformation, SDN/NFV, Vendor Transformation
David Snow
David Snow

Summary Bullets:

  • At first sight, NFV looks to remove some of traditional benchmarks of telecom product comparison: performance and capacity metrics.
  • In reality, nothing has changed. Now, it is a VNF’s capability to manage the NFVI through the VNFM that is going to count.

While not a quant house, Current Analysis is well known for both qualitative and quantitative product comparisons, and for the latter, it uses an extensive repertoire of product metrics, often somewhat disparagingly referred to as the “speeds and feeds.” While NFV is some way off, or will never happen, for some market segments (e.g., the IP and optical core; see “Specialized Network Devices Will Not Be Going Away (Anytime Soon)”), a new picture is emerging in the more NFV-intensive zones of the service and control layers. Continue reading “Does NFV Signal the End of “Speeds & Feeds” Product Comparisons?” →

Transport SDN – Still the Low-Hanging Fruit

by , posted in SDN/NFV
Rick Talbot
Rick Talbot

Summary Bullets:

  • Transport SDN promises much shorter-term rewards than broader high-profile efforts.
  • Progress towards transport SDN can be seen in the demand for agile transport services, standards work and deployments this year.

Over the past year, network systems vendors have touted high-profile strategies to transform the service provider business model through extending software-defined networking (SDN) beyond the data center to support network functions virtualization (NFV) throughout the wide area network (WAN). The Tier 1 service providers appear to be embracing these same strategies as they seek to leverage virtual network functions (VNFs) to create new differentiated services. However, these broad efforts can be extremely complex, will likely require fundamental changes in the service provider business operations and appear to rely on a seemingly endless set of standards to avoid vendor lock-in. No wonder service provider SDN and NFV seem to be so far off.

However, another SDN trend has been taking place at the same time, one that promises much shorter-term rewards. It appears the transport SDN is still SDN’s low-hanging fruit and is of immediate interest to service providers. This progress towards transport SDN can be measured in three ways. Continue reading “Transport SDN – Still the Low-Hanging Fruit” →

Nokia 2014 Analyst Conference: Great Lengths to Show How Blue Looks Different Than Purple and Orange

by Glen Hunt, posted in Vendor Transformation
Glenn Hunt
Glenn Hunt

Summary Bullets:

  • Nokia is focused on four fundamental objectives: maintaining its leadership in radio, growing professional services capabilities, winning with innovative telco cloud and SDN solutions, and extending its presence into the Internet of Things. Quality, innovation, partnering and automation are the drivers it will leverage in order to meet these objectives.
  • Nokia’s three business areas – Nokia Networks, HERE and Nokia Technologies – are aligned under a mantra of technological competencies, innovation capabilities, software strengths, its strong brand, trust, a lean operating model and intellectual property. The new Nokia has aligned these three areas under a common model which stresses operational excellence.

Nokia held its annual industry analyst conference on December 2-3, 2014 in Boston, which has been the customary venue for the past four years. This year, there was an undeniable feeling of optimism and confidence that topped prior years’ events. This was perhaps due with the feeling that the company has put the challenges of restructuring and uncertainty behind it and now has a solid, executable plan to take the next step in the progression of the new Nokia (which is less than a year old). Continue reading “Nokia 2014 Analyst Conference: Great Lengths to Show How Blue Looks Different Than Purple and Orange” →

Comptel: Can It Pump Data Refinery to Oil Operator Big Data Objectives?

by , posted in OSS/BSS/CEM
Ron Westfall
Ron Westfall

Summary Bullets:

• Comptel, with its new big data refinery approach and data mediation technology, Comptel EventLink 7.0, targets operator objectives to enrich and link their vast data stores to intelligent data streams with actionable, real-time capabilities.

• Comptel needs to address how open source big data standards, such as Apache Spark, relates to its data refinery proposition, as well as how it can enable operators to uphold in-country data regulations.

Comptel unveiled its data refinery concept to support the release of its big data mediation product, Comptel EventLink 7.0, designed to cultivate intelligent data streaming. The Compel data refinery approach advocates operators use updated data mediation technology to validate and refine raw, historical and real-time data into operational and business intelligence. Combined with reporting and machine-learning capabilities, data refinery aims to improve the efficiency and actionable range of operator back-office applications such as real-time network and service monitoring and proactive QoS maintenance.
Continue reading “Comptel: Can It Pump Data Refinery to Oil Operator Big Data Objectives?” →

Revisiting Gigabit Broadband: Will 100+ U.S. Telcos Light a Fire Under Cable Operators?

by , posted in Ultra Broadband
Erik Keith
Erik Keith

Summary Bullets:

  • In the past few months, ADTRAN and Calix have both publicly asserted supporting more than 50 customer networks that can offer Gigabit broadband connectivity, primarily in the U.S. market. Alcatel-Lucent also provides the access networking solutions that anchor Gigabit service delivery in several high-profile, pioneering Gigabit networks. At present, more than 100 U.S. operators offer Gigabit services.
  • After first downplaying the need for Gigabit services, major cable operators – joined by telco AT&T – have asserted pending Gigabit service implementations where demand dictates. But, cable network support for mass-market residential Gigabit service deployments will require major network upgrades (ultimately FTTH).

Six months ago, I asked, “Gigabit Broadband: Do We Need It? Why Not?” Since then, we have seen some additional momentum on the Gigabit front, at least in the U.S. market, with notable fixed access networking vendors ADTRAN and Calix both announcing their support of 50 networks, cities or communities that offer Gigabit connectivity. While there are some devil-in-the-details caveats to these claims (for example, Calix’s separate counting of CenturyLink’s Gigabit deployments in eight different U.S. states), the bottom line is that in a surprising number of U.S. metro areas, Gigabit services are a reality. As an added bonus, a good number of rural and smaller-market operators – exemplified by C Spire (leveraging ADTRAN gear), which is deploying Gigabit services in 10 Mississippi cities/towns – are also investing in the Gigabit future. Finally, there is Google Fiber, which is still keeping key details about its network build-out and subscriber base secret, but is apparently on the verge of announcing another major shift forward or geographic expansion. Continue reading “Revisiting Gigabit Broadband: Will 100+ U.S. Telcos Light a Fire Under Cable Operators?” →

Oracle and InfoVista: How Far Can They Drive Network-as-a-Service?

by , posted in OSS/BSS/CEM
Ron Westfall
Ron Westfall

Summary Bullets:

• Oracle and InfoVista teamed up to demo their Carrier Ethernet 2.0 NaaS Orchestration PoC at the MEF’s GEN14 event targeting operator expansion and investment in cloud-based services aimed at enterprises.

• Oracle and InfoVista gain a key starting point to sell operators and enterprises on adopting CE 2.0 NaaS applications but gain additional marketing credibility by firming up their NFV MANO proposition and recruiting CE equipment partners.

Oracle and InfoVista collaborated to demonstrate “Carrier Ethernet (CE) 2.0 Network-as-a-Service Orchestration (NaaS) Orchestrated and Assured” at the MEF GEN14 Proof of Concept (PoC) Showcase. The goal of the PoC sought to show the potential for self-serve ordering of NaaS across operator and wholesale partner networks, including its design for network technology abstraction. The PoC demo combined SDN/NFV, service orchestration, and automated provisioning elements to showcase its potential effectiveness in supporting operator NaaS service packages. Key elements of the PoC included: Continue reading “Oracle and InfoVista: How Far Can They Drive Network-as-a-Service?” →

Specialized Network Devices Will Not Be Going Away (Anytime Soon)

by Glen Hunt, posted in Net Transformation, SDN/NFV
Glenn Hunt
Glenn Hunt

Summary Bullets:

  • Not all parts of the service provider network infrastructure can benefit from virtualization; analysis of the IP and optical core and the aggregation layer, for example, points toward the continued use of specialized hardware/silicon and networking software.
  • The operational model service providers are looking to is more about service agility than it is about running everything on an x86 blade; dedicated hardware equipped with high-performance network processors continues to be the ideal choice to support high-speed/high-density 100G Ethernet and optical super-channels.

As operators seek to add programmability and agility into their services (and, thus, their networks), it is clear that the discussion regarding which functions should be virtualized versus those that should continue to be performed by specialized hardware/silicon solutions will continue, even as vendors such as Intel and Cisco push the envelope to ratchet up the performance of their x86-based platforms with multi-core architectures and new high-performance development environments. Virtualization certainly makes sense for anything that is heavily weighted toward compute and storage and for data plane applications that require moderate throughput. However, in the IP core network, where the demand is to support multiple terabits of throughput, custom solutions comprised of vendor-specific silicon and hardware will continue to provide a viable, if not the only, solution. Continue reading “Specialized Network Devices Will Not Be Going Away (Anytime Soon)” →