ATLANTA – Despite a steadily growing number of NFV (network functions virtualization) lab trials and pilot deployments, the cable industry is still lagging well behind the telecom industry in virtualizing its network functions and equipment because the cablecos lack key business reasons for doing so.
That was the general consensus among a number of top cable technologists at the annual SCTE Cable-Tec Expo show in Atlanta earlier this week. Speaking on a breakfast roundtable hosted by Light Reading, the cable techs argued the shift to virtualized networks doesn’t make business sense, yet.
"We sometimes get ahead with technologies just because we're technologists," Jeff Finkelstein, executive director of advanced technology at Cox Communications, said in a keynote address before the broader panel discussion. "I'd like to have a business problem behind it… The dilemma is that there are so many activities going on around virtualization, but there's no centre."
Don Clarke, principal architect of network technologies at CableLabs, seconded the notion. "You need a business driver," he said during the panel discussion, noting that no service provider is going to switch out technologies just because the new technology seems to be new and shiny.
Steve Marsh, CTO of North America for software provider Intraway, agreed and noted that retrofitting or replacing a provider's OSS and BSS platform (operations support system/business support system) and changing its billing and workforce management "are big decisions to make," so they won't be made without a real business use-case behind them.
Oren Marmur, VP and head of NFV at Amdocs, argued some cable operators are either "waiting for the right solution or the right opportunity before jumping ahead" with network virtualization.
Like several industry vendors represented on the panel Pete Koat, CTO at Vancouver-based Incognito Software, said his company is engaged in a growing number of lab trials with MSOs, but he observed that all that work has not yet made a big impact financially.
Speakers blamed cable's lagging adoption of network virtualization on several other factors as well. Koat, for one, laid a good chunk of the blame on the fragmentation of virtualization standards and approaches.
Jeff Leung, head of cable products and services at Casa Systems, argued cable operators still need a common framework for making virtualization a reality. In his keynote, Cox’s Finkelstein agreed. Operators need to know which road to take.
Surprisingly, the breakfast speakers agreed that implementing the technology behind virtualized networks, while certainly not a snap, is not necessarily one of the biggest obstacles. Marmur explained that there are some major organizational challenges posed by the new concepts and approaches that virtualization represents. "There's a lot of resistance to change," he noted.
Nevertheless, the cable industry is making some progress, the experts agreed. For one thing, CableLabs has formed a cable operator working group to develop the missing common framework and identify and analyze the standards bodies involved in projects critical to cable.
CableLabs and its MSO partners can "put a stake in the ground" with virtualization reference architectures, Clarke said. He noted that his organization is aiming to put together a group of best practices and document them by next spring.
In addition, the cable industry's growing embrace of distributed access architectures (DAA) will encourage cable operators to move toward network virtualization, the experts said. Indeed, operators and vendors are now sizing up a new Flexible MAC Architecture (FMA) from CableLabs that will push headend functionality closer to the edge of the network and enable the broader system to support multiple transport layers, such as DOCSIS, Wi-Fi and PON.
Finkelstein said this push to the network edge – with both the PHY and the MAC – will dive the creation of new services that support low-latency applications and services that go well beyond gigabit data speeds. That, in turn, "takes us into that next realm of a services-oriented network," he said.
