AT&T has set new goals for its SDN NFV deployments. AT&T’s new targets are important for other telecoms as well.
AT&T’s John Donovan announced the next milestone in the mobile operator’s NFV and SDN-centric User-Defined Network vision – the goal of virtualizing and controlling over 75 percent of its network using the new architecture by 2020.
John Donovan, senior executive vice president, AT&T Technology and Operations, admits that it’s an ambitious target for the transformation it announced in GSMA Congress 2014 at Barcelona earlier this year.
Last month, AT&T said its Capex (capital spending) for 2015 will be nearly $18 billion against an earlier estimate of $20 billion.
ALSO READ: AT&T to slash Capex for 2015 to nearly $18 billion
SDN and NFV will be one of the main tools to bring down its Capex plans. AT&T is one of a handful of operators actively driving SDN and NFV forward – paving the way for others to follow.
ALSO READ: How AT&T is spending $21 billion as telecom Capex in 2014
Current Analysis says that AT&T’s goal of virtualizing and controlling over 75 percent of its network using Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) will pave the way for the industry, but lack of IT heavyweights in vendor roster could be short-sighted.
New vendors will likely be integrated by AT&T’s existing suppliers Affirmed Networks, Alcatel-Lucent, Amdocs, Brocade, Ciena, Cisco, Ericsson, Fujitsu, Juniper and Metaswitch, according to Current Analysis.
ALSO READ: Telecoms Capex investment to touch $346 bn in 2015 with flat growth
Telecom research and analysis agency Ovum earlier today said SDN and NFV will lower operations and Capex, along with new service/feature deployment.
SDN and NFV are part of the AT&T’s long term strategies.
Focusing on innovation, AT&T launched a capability called Network on Demand. In 80 seconds, using a self-service app, customers can adjust their network speeds as needed, and dial back down when traffic recedes. It launched AT&T NetBond to help businesses connect to their preferred cloud services through VPN.
“Surveying 100 service provider executives, the faster service rollout implied in AT&T’s Network on Demand solution was cited by 92 percent of operators as an investment or deployment priority over the next three years,” said Peter Jarich, vice president of Consumer and Infrastructure research at Current Analysis.
Last month, AT&T Labs Advanced Technologies team launched quality-of-service technology in its data centers that detects which applications a customer is running and intelligently allocates bandwidth for the most critical tasks.
Using SDN, AT&T’s Advanced Technologies researchers built a streaming cloud environment for its mobility network data centers. It can deploy new functions into network almost instantly with a software update.
“For service providers, SDN and NFV are about the integration of IT principles, assets and operations into their service-bearing networks. Bringing IT vendors into these transformations at a foundational level only makes sense in order to benefit from their insights and assets and culture,” Jarich added.
Baburajan K
editor@telecomlead.com