Last week’s Broadband World Forum in London focused heavily on network virtualization, but there was little consensus. As always in the early days of a significant architectural shift, operators are deeply divided between the trailblazers and the cautious movers, and between the technology bulls and bears. There was a common theme that anything vendor-controlled or proprietary would be killed by a rising reliance on open source processes. Despite some qualms about this unfamiliar world, most operators – publicly at least – hail this as a positive, a way to tap into more innovation while ending supplier lock-in by adopting open interfaces and multivendor platforms. They also hoped open source would enable quicker transformation, but in this regard, the number of…