Tracking the Hardware to Software shift for Indian Operators

Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) and Software Defined Networks (SDN) have been referred to as paradigm shifts that will transform service providers’ networks from a pre-defined set of physical infrastructure components to a set of modular software building blocks.

In fact, according to Infonectics Research, the global carrier SDN and NFV market is expected to grow from less than $500 mn in 2013 to over $11 bn in 2018.

Indian operators can benefit from NFV and SDN in many ways. For example, these technologies will allow them to differentiate by offering new services more quickly and cost-effectively, unleashing new business models and, for the end-user, by enhancing ways of working.

SDN will enable connectivity- or bandwidth-on-demand services, allowing for flexible and scalable connections between locations. It will also provide the ability to pre-schedule temporarily dedicated, multi-site capacity with VPN-on-demand service, so customers can pay for additional capacity that they can allocate amongst their locations when needed, rather than be constrained by long-term contracts for fixed capacity sized for peak demand requirements.

By freeing up the network and enabling real-time analytics, SDN allows operators to better utilize their network resources and embrace dynamic pricing. Much like an airline adjusting pricing as flights full up, so can an operator adjust their pricing for periods of high or low bandwidth demand. Customers have a greater variety of price offerings and greater flexibility, while operators can maximize the network and embrace more dynamic business models.

NFV enables greater agility. By shifting services, such as encryption, that were previously the preserve of large organisations executed on dedicated, purpose-built hardware to a virtualised and consolidated, generic compute platform on common-off-the-shelf servers, operators have the flexibility to adapt to changes and customer demands much faster than in the past. These services can be provisioned remotely, turned on and off - and scaled up and down as needed.

NFV gives operators the ability to introduce and trial new services, respond to customer demands much faster and create new upsell opportunities. As a result they can greatly accelerate and simplify the introduction of new services and experiment with more new product offerings since the hurdle of potentially wasted hardware is overcome. As more service functions become virtualized additional add-ons to basic managed connectivity services will be easier to implement and deploy, allowing operators to create more valuable on-demand offerings, developing packages for a target vertical market, for example.

Service providers in India are particularly concerned with prepping their networks for advanced mobile backhaul to address the profitable and huge growth in mobile broadband data services, and there are some important ways that SDN and NFV will be helpful in engineering this high-performance backhaul. Operators can look to SDN and NFV for orchestration of a cloud RAN environment and simplification of the backhaul infrastructure where a virtualized pool of resources could potentially be managed by an SDN application. Additionally, SDN can help organize traffic flows and handoff mechanisms across small cell architectures, where there is now a possibility for an order of magnitude more radio heads than in traditional macro cell environments.

As we move into 2015, we can expect to see an increase in SDN and NFV. These technologies will help Indian operators transition their networks from hardware to software-defined platforms. This will add automation to create greater operational flexibility, dynamic bandwidth provisioning and new services to meet today’s dynamic user demands.

Ryan Perera,

(country head, Ciena)