TORONTO—Network innovation is not only a tough thing for service providers to carry out, it also means very different things to different people.
That certainly seemed to be the case here Monday during the first day of the Canadian Telecom Summit at the Toronto Congress Centre. In a late afternoon panel focusing on how service providers can transform their delivery networks, four leading telecom executives described network innovation in distinctly different ways and often spelled out distinctly different ways for making it happen.
Take James Buchanan, SVP and GM of Ensemble at ADVA Optical Networking. For Buchanan, network innovation calls for fully adopting open technologies and methods, not some bastardized version of them that leaves proprietary hardware still in place somewhere in the network.
"Traditional vendors have done a bit of a head fake towards open solutions," he complained. However, he noted, enterprise customers are now fighting back by insisting on more than just hybrid solutions from their vendors. "It's very clear to us around the world that enterprises have dug in and said 'this is what I want’," he said.
Or consider Telus CTO Ibrahim Gedeon. For Gedeon (who also spoke earlier in the day), network innovation requires above all making sure that all the various parts of the network architecture can communicate clearly and smoothly with each other. "You need something that does not change that makes sense," he said. "We have to speak the same language."
Then there's Allstream COO Ray Lahoud. For Lahoud, network innovation means that service providers must embrace flexible, software-based architectures. "It's really about taking the network to the next level and allowing for softer controls and more flexibility," he said. "It's taking the network to the cloud as much as possible."
Finally, listen to David Fell, CEO of Eastern Ontario Regional Broadband Network. For Fell, network innovation is all about filling the service gaps left by the private sector in rural, underpopulated areas. "We use market failure as a basis for innovation," he said, citing his organization's leveraging of public-private partnerships (with a good dose of public funds) to build new networks. "We don't aim to own the network. We try to determine where there's market failure."
But, while network innovation may be in the eye of the beholder, all the panelists agreed that, as a U.S. Supreme Court justice once famously opined about pornography, they know what it is when they see it. And they agreed that network innovation is finally happening in the telecom sector, long after the trend towards virtualization and software-based architectures began to lead the computing world.
"It's really about cost per bit." – Ray Lahoud, Allstream
"That wave never crashed into telecom," largely because of a lack of processing power, Buchanan said. But now, he continued, that compute power is there and things are starting to happen.
Even while the telecom industry's transformational shift towards software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) is finally underway, however, the panelists also agreed that there's still a long way for the industry to go. In fact, Gedeon reckons that the telecom industry is still just in the early phases of a four-stage process towards full software-based architectures featuring containers and microservices. "We're not there yet," he said. "I think we're in phase two."
As part of the network innovation process, service providers are generally striving to slash their overall operational expenses. But several panelists said it's more critical to drive down cost per bit than total cost of ownership (TCO). "It's not about cost," Lahoud said. "It's really about cost per bit."
The experts also warned network operators not to lose sight of their customers. As virtualization and the embrace of software-based architectures make networks ever more complicated, they said, providers must focus on making things easier for their customers, not harder. Unfortunately, they admitted, that's easier said than done. "It's about the customer journey," Gedeon said (which echoed the customer service panel on Monday). "We're simplifying things for the customer, [yet] as we simplify, this stuff is getting very complex."
Finally, the panelists agreed, service providers must find ways to monetize the new services and capabilities that network innovation can bring, such as the Internet of things (IoT) and Big Data. "They have to find a way to monetize IoT," Fell said, "because all of that data can't run for free."
