NFV: What’s Good? Price/Performance for Starters

Guest post by 6Wind

TL;DR: NFV Promises To Alter The Value Proposition For Network Operators Of All Sizes

As we prepare for SDN Asia 2015 in Singapore this October, we look forward to discussing how executive telecom decision makers want to capitalize on the APAC market’s propensity for rapid technology adoption by providing an abundance of services at the lowest costs. NFV enables rapid service creation while lowering costs, but it is necessary to not sacrifice performance in the process.

Performance continues to drive the NFV discussion because without proper oversight, virtual machines and cloud infrastructure can be real headaches by demanding increasing requirements of hardware to accommodate an increasing software footprint. To achieve an abundance of services at the lowest costs, enabling performance in the initial design architecture will help further drive the costs down. There are two major areas of performance bottlenecks that organizations should evaluate to enable the full promise of NFV.

5G Focus – Interview with Don McCullough, Director of Strategic Communications at Ericsson

Don McCullough, Director Strategic Communications, Ericsson

Ericsson made a splash at Mobile World Congress, describing and demonstrating their vision for 5G, and all the different use cases they envision for the technology.

Ahead of 5G Forum USA in Palo Alto in a couple of weeks, we had the opportunity to catch-up with Don McCullough, Director of Strategic Communications at Ericsson. During the interview, Don shared Ericsson’s work in innovating and defining the 5G landscape, their objectives and likely use cases for this next generation.

Anera wins award for “Top Innovator” at LTE North America 2014

Ryley MacKenzie, CEO of Anera collects his prize for Top Innovator at LTE North America

Anera, an SDN and NFV solution provider, was crowned the winner of this year’s Innovation Accelerator at LTE North America in Dallas.

The Innovation Accelerator aims to discover the most exciting start-ups in the market today. This year, hundreds of entries poured in prior to the event, and were subsequently wittled down to a shortlist of 3 companies by our judging panel. Those three companies then pitched their services to a panel of expert judges and the LTE North America attendees.

How can you measure Customer Experience in the Data Tsunami?

This post is by Neil McKinlay, Senior Manager – Product Management, Anritsu

The market is changing rapidly, with new applications and usage models appearing daily. LTE is a major driving force in this change by providing reliable high bandwidth to mobile devices.

The cost of that ubiquitous bandwidth is falling with the realizing of NFV and SDN technology, further pushing down the cost per megabit delivered to the end customer.

This is all great news for the industry, more bandwidth, more users, more apps, new devices, higher quality connections, video support. What’s not to like?

Interview: Telco Tech Lead, Telefónica Digital: “As the telco core moves away from circuit-switched technology to pure IP it will be a must for operators to relay all network infrastructure to virtualization technologies.”

Virtualisation is a must for operators says Daniel Velasco, Telco Tech Lead for Telefónica Digital. Velasco will be leading discussions on service innovation at the LTE Operator Mindshare 2014, taking place on the 23rd June 2014, at the Amsterdam RAI, Netherlands.

What would you say are the key challenges that you are facing as you continue to develop your LTE networks?

In our team we are focusing in communications service innovation that should interwork with legacy services. The mix of legacy voice/SMS and LTE enabled VoLTE is a great challenge to provide global services available to users no matter the core technology they use.

What is your view on NFV and SDN – are these just buzz words or are they relevant to your planned network deployment?

Regarding NFV and SDN, as the telco core moves away from circuit-switched technology to pure IP it will be a must for operators to relay all network infrastructure to virtualization technologies. In all projects in which we are involved, this virtualization would help a lot but is not currently supported in the industry for elements below service layer. It will reduce costs and time to market of new network features.