The threat from over-the-top providers, and the shift of the US telecoms market towards convergence and cloud platforms, has driven the cablecos to become far more technologically innovative. They are expanding into wireless connectivity and also into virtualization, with their R&D arm, CableLabs, becoming active in previously unfamiliar standards efforts like 3GPP and ETSI. With the latter, CableLabs is working on many projects connected to two key ETSI initiatives, NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) and MEC (Multi-Access Edge Computing). From July this year, ETSI has been rolling out its planned series of five standards to define how virtual network functions (VNFs) should be configured for ease of deployment and management. A key contributor has been Don Clarke, co-author of of the…