Everyone is talking about Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) these days. But wouldn’t you rather hear what the people who are implementing NFV in their own network have to say about it? Then tune in for the re-broadcast of the October 4th Light Reading webinar, “Best Practices for Today’s NFV Deployments and the Journey to 5G,” featuring Ibrahim Gideon, CTO of Telus Corporation, and Hassan Ahmed, CEO of Affirmed Networks.
Telus was just named Canada’s fastest mobile network by PCMag last month. They’re also one of the first networks in Canada to embrace NFV as their network platform of the future. In this webinar, Gideon, Ahmed and Light Reading analyst Gabriel Brown lay out the state of NFV today, including emerging best practices and lessons learned on the front lines of the 5G revolution.
In his opening remarks, Byrne set the stage with a quick look at where NFV is today in the industry. He noted that operators are confidently moving forward with Virtualized Network Function (VNF) deployments, and that an encouraging number of those VNFs are being deployed in cloud-like infrastructures. Yet, he also pointed to a lack of interoperability and automation in VNF deployments as well as a reluctance among operators to commit to an NFV platform as areas where the industry needs to improve.
During his presentation, Ibrahim Gideon provided listeners with an honest, detailed account of his company’s network transformation experience. Gideon described the NFV journey as having multiple phases, beginning with simple capex reduction and leading, eventually, to a state of “NFV Nirvana” where network capacity could be split easily across locations and one operations team could manage everything. Gideon acknowledged areas where the transformation ran into difficulties, as well as the solutions that Telus and Affirmed developed to address those issues.
Hassan Ahmed shared some of the key NFV lessons learned during the company’s 100+ trial and production deployments, many of which were re-affirmed by Gideon’s experiences. These included:
- Don’t look at capex savings as the end, but as the beginning to NFV’s real value: opex reduction and revenue generation.
- Have a virtualization strategy—don’t simply build a software version of the hardware network you have today.
- Do your homework and choose NFV solutions that already support 5G features today: network slicing, service automation, self-intelligent networks, etc.
If NFV is in your future, you owe it to yourself to listen to this webinar today. Leveraging the lessons learned by successful NFV adopters can help ensure that your network transformational roadmap leads your business beyond the simple promise of capex reduction to higher revenues in the 5G future.
