The operator momentum behind virtualization has mounted more quickly than anyone had expected, and for once, a standards body has helped accelerate, rather than hold back, the pace of progress. ETSI’s NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) industry specification group has played a major role in unifying the wide range of vendor and carrier efforts into a set of specs which really can underpin deployments, and early trials are already going on in various parts of the network from CPE to core. There have also been about 30 multi-company projects and demonstrations. Now the group has signed off the first phase of its work, which created the base common architecture, but it is moving on to phase two. About 240 organizations were…