NFV Juggling Act

It's still early days for NFV, but this year it's poised to move out of labs and into real world proof-of-concept trials and limited deployments.

According to a NFV survey conducted by Heavy Reading on behalf of the Open Platform for NFV Project Inc. , 20% of the operators were in the testing or proof-of-concept (PoC) stage as of June. In addition, 21% of the respondents in the survey said they were in production deployment with NFV, which was a 9% increase from a similar survey in September of last year.

The survey, which was completed by 90 respondents from service providers around the world, also found that 6% of the operators had no NFV strategy planned at all, which was down from 14% in the previous survey.

Some of the areas of concern for the development of NFV that were cited in the survey included interoperability testing, developing a reference architecture and providing testing facilities.

With the virtualization of network services that were traditionally handled by proprietary, dedicated hardware, NFV implementations reduce capex and opex, increase flexibility and agility of services and reduce the time to market for new services.

The infographic below includes NFV-related research from Heavy Reading and IHS Markit, both of which outline operators' plans for NFV and some of the barriers they face.

— Mike Robuck, Editor, Telco Transformation