The architecture choice for many telcos is no longer ‘to virtualize or not’. The big decisions are which network elements to virtualize first, and when; and whether to convert physical systems to virtual, or start from scratch with a cloud-native strategy. And having decided that, what approach to take – one with its roots in the traditional enterprise market, like VMware; one coming from the telco world, probably under the auspices of ETSI; or a ‘pure’ open source option. These three choices are starting to drive faultlines through the nascent telco virtualization and SDN (software-defined networking) market. At the edge of the network, which will become increasingly important as IoT devices proliferate, the three camps are increasingly visible. A new…