Last week we noted the extension of ETSI’s NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) activity into phase two, with a broadened remit and an urgent, operator-driven focus on interoperability. Mobile carriers see the transformation of the network architecture as a way to shake up their traditional supplier relationships and enjoy a more open and competitive vendor landscape. Virtualizing network functions in software, on standard hardware or in the cloud, is a key element of this transformation, turning the actual boxes in an increasingly flexible and distributed network into commodities. But operators are aware that a software-based world can still produce lock-ins and siloes, and are desperate to avoid that in NFV.
This platform is one which the carriers have driven, despite the best efforts of some vendors to shape it, and that has been one reason for an unexpectedly intense wave of interest and trials, going way beyond the empty hype that often comes with new technologies. However, because virtualization potentially affects every part of the network, from data center to transport, packet core to RAN to CPE, there are many other technologies and industry bodies which need to be involved, raising the danger of fragmentation.
Alliances with the Open Network Foundation, Broadband Forum and many others are important to ensure that NFV fits well into existing environments and can be adopted across different types of network as they evolve. But there needs to be an overall effort with the power to bring all these activities together and ensure they stick to a unified roadmap. A red flag was waved, for instance, when the north American telecoms standards group ATIS (Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions) announced the creation of its own NFV Forum, which would work on specifications for the emerging platform.
Will this be a complementary effort, adding to the richness of overall NFV, or is it a good old-fashioned territorial dispute in standards, with a north American body seeking to steal a march on its European counterpart? And even if the intentions are noble, how easy will it be for the two bodies’ developments, and those of other parties, to be coordinated and unified without bogging the whole program down in politics and bureaucracy, dampening what has been an impressive initial spark of operator enthusiasm?
ATIS is promising to work with other standards bodies and, like the ETSI group, is heavily carrier-driven, so interoperability and coordination are likely to be high on the agenda. The body says that the platform is so broad that no one organization could address all its aspects, and it will be important for each interested party to ensure it focuses on unique and complementary items. But it promises not to overlap or conflict with the ETSI activity.
“We are all working at a high level on NFV,” said ATIS’s VP of technology and standards, Andrew White. “Once you get into the details, it is very much a distributed software problem. ATIS is working on unique aspects of that.”
And its operator members will be cheered that one of those “unique aspects” is inter-carrier interoperability, together with new service descriptions and use cases. One area of focus will be the automation of interoperability processes, such as APIs that allow operators to expose virtualized network functions to other providers and to enterprises, as the basis for creating new services and ensuring they can interwork.
White believes such processes could extend roaming beyond voice, data and messaging, and into services such as network security, once a virtualized firewall is shared across carriers, for example.
The chair of the new NFV Forum, Tom Anderson, is a principal engineer at Cisco Mobility and is equally convinced that there will not be a conflict with the ETSI effort – indeed, he has already held informal talks with his counterpart at the ETSI NFV Industry Specifications Group, Stephen Wright of AT&T. “We have done a landscape effort to sort out who is doing what in NFV and to see where the gaps are. What we are doing is filling the gaps we saw,” he said in an interview with LightReading. “NFV is a really big thing and pretty much people are doing a good job of working on different aspects, and then working together, which is pretty unusual in the standards domain.”
One of the goals of ATIS, which has perhaps been sidelined by ETSI, is to get the web giants such as Google involved. Clearly that could create conflicts of interest with traditional operators, which see virtualization as a way to enhance their own networks and business cases in order to compete with over-the-top alternatives. However, it will be impossible to ignore the services that Google, Facebook and others deliver over wireless networks, and ATIS already has strong connections with these players via its Open Web Alliance.
ATIS will also have the advantage of being able to harness work which it has already done in other groups such as its Cloud Services Forum and its SDN/NFV Focus Group. The latter was set up earlier this year and has been working on inter-carrier issues too, suggesting that this will be the key contribution of the new Forum while ETSI remains the primary source for core specifications. The Focus Group has particularly concentrated on inter-provider service chaining and the business case for inter-provider NFV.
The work of the Cloud Services Forum could avoid reinventing the wheel in terms of the requirements for interconnecting content delivery networks and other systems in a federated environment; and devising a common catalog of service descriptions to be used by all providers, one of the NFV Forum’s most immediate promised deliverables (in 6-9 months’ time). All the work will be public and will be fed into other standards groups where appropriate.
However, it is notable that the ATIS effort is chaired by a vendor representative, and is bringing in alternative influencers beyond the traditional carriers which have dominated the ETSI group. And some of the biggest operators driving the accelerated pace of NFV adoption will not be content to leave it to standards bodies to ensure openness and interoperability in future. Telefonica, the poster child for real world NFV trials, is calling its peers to support a common infrastructure to underpin virtualized functions throughout the network.
Of course, the Spanish giant wants to shape and drive how that platform would look, to gain influence and a strong return on its investment in virtualization R&D. Its initiative is based on its own NFV Reference Lab, which has been working on platforms and trials involving 15 vendors and many countries in its European and Latin American footprint.
Diego Lopez, head of technology exploration at Telefonica’s I+D unit, said operators can no longer play by the old rules where they pursued competitive advantage through their own secret platforms. Instead, they need to “get out of their comfort zones and learn to play according to the rules of much opener communities,” he told LightReading.
“The great improvements that NFV can bring to networks are flexibility and efficiency, and, in order to grant the success of this new network model, it is essential to avoid the consolidation of vertically integrated and/or proprietary monolithic solutions, where hardware, hypervisor, Virtual Infrastructure Manager, and orchestrator would be required to come from the same vendor,” Lopez said, summing up the third great motivation for carriers to adopt NFV – in addition to cost reduction and service flexibility, it could change their economics by ending the supplier lock-in and the vertically integrated model.
He argues that NFV does not have to use a unique homogeneous infrastructure, but can borrow its building blocks from other telecoms platforms, as long as it is adopted throughout the market and with full interoperability. The key to openness is not to run all functions on the same hardware, but to ensure that there are standard APIs (application programming interfaces) for specialized accelerators.
In its Lab, the carrier is working with its 15 partners to enhance basic virtualization technologies taken from the open source world – currently covering about 20 functions – to make them fully carrier-class. It will then contribute its enhancements back to open source. The Lab is built around commodity switches, hypervisors, OpenStack virtual infrastructure management and orchestrators.
But it hopes to go further and see major operators linking up their NFV reference labs and sharing their R&D findings, in order to accelerate progress – and ensure carriers, not vendors, stay at the helm of NFV evolution. At a conference in July, Lopez said Telefonica was already “federating reference labs” with other providers to “validate common use cases, experiment with collaboration mechanisms, explore business models, and build a global reference implementation”, though he did not name any of the partners. However, he did say that the labs would collaborate via a virtual network based on Alcatel-Lucent’s CloudBand platform.
Telefonica is also interested in driving a common, open infrastructure management layer for NFV, once the baseline technologies have been established, and is likely to support OpenStack as the focus point for that layer.
But all this involves a profound cultural shift for many operators. Some carriers’ economics do rely on waiting for standardized platforms before deploying new technology, but there is an important group which drives innovation and takes on the risk of creating and rolling out cutting edge systems. These operators often have highly secretive R&D operations and, while they donate some of their developments to standards bodies such as the 3GPP, they also regard differentiation in their network performance as a competitive edge.
This is the mentality which Lopez and his colleagues believe must end if NFV is to be successful, and a key test will be how many operators join Telefonica’s ‘federated lab’ – and how many try to seize the upper hand themselves instead, by establishing rival ‘open’ initiatives. If those old behaviors do not emerge, there is hope for a truly interoperable NFV platform in future, however many standards groups get involved.