Carrier network virtualization is one of the few technologies in the history of the telecoms industry which has become ‘real’ more quickly than expected. On the mobile side, the typical pattern is to proclaim the ‘year of’ an emerging standard at least three years running, before it actually becomes mainstream – the kind of approach which feeds the Gartner hype cycle. However, while virtualization of data centers and some enterprise network elements is well established, applying that approach to a carrier network appeared to be a massive mountain to climb when it was first mooted. Yet, with ETSI’s NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) initiative as the catalyst and a rare point of near-consensus, this architecture is actually becoming real. It is…