A few years ago, I was leading an R&D team at BT and driving the international service provider collaboration on NFV under the umbrella of the ETSI NFV Industry Specification Group. We made rapid progress on a PoC for a “Virtual CPE (vCPE)” using software versions of network appliances commonly deployed in the BT network.
Having proven the technical feasibility and economics of NFV, we had moved quickly to exploring the operational implications for vCPE which was of great interest to our business unit sponsors at BT Global Services.
But why was BT Global Services so interested in vCPE?
They were interested for the same reasons that service providers are interested in universal CPE (uCPE) today, especially for managed SD-WAN services.
The need to differentiate
Reliable global connectivity is critically important to large multi-national enterprises such as banks who are lucrative accounts, but who are also highly demanding. Competition amongst the global carriers for these customers is fierce because contracts are typically multi-year and worth many millions of dollars. To win these accounts, not only must all the usual commercial and technical requirements be met, but these customers also want demonstrable assurances that the technology deployed by the carrier would evolve to meet their needs over the lifetime of the contract and beyond. Hence, it was very important to differentiate on long term technical capability as well as fast service activation and BT Global Services correctly identified NFV as providing them with a competitive edge.
Today, managed SD-WAN service providers are also leveraging the benefits of uCPE to differentiate their service offerings. Standardising on ‘white box’ uCPE hardware while mixing and matching best of breed SD-WAN and security software functions from third party vendors enables them to flex service capability and cost; it also enables them to offer value-added services such as data and video analytics running on the same uCPE hardware.
Avoiding supply problems
Supporting large multi-national enterprise customers requires global carriers to stand up network switching and routing nodes in locations close to population centers and to interconnect them with high-capacity fiber links leased from local providers. Building these networks is a complex project management task involving commercial contracts with multiple entities, including equipment suppliers, and importing many different types of hardware including CPE into a foreign jurisdiction is fraught with uncertainty, involving the acquisition of export licenses, shipping high value equipment overseas from multiple sources and transiting through customs which can add considerable delay. The result is significant uncertainty as to when the service will be available at the customer location, potentially putting customer relationships and service income in jeopardy.
The vCPE concept enabled all of the proprietary network appliances needed to stand up a network service in a remote location to be consolidated onto a range of industry standard servers commonly available world-wide, massively simplifying logistics, inventory and sparing, and avoiding delays and uncertainties.
Managed SD-WAN service providers who don’t build infrastructure also benefit from massive simplification of CPE inventory and sparing. In addition, supply chain resilience can be improved in the face of component shortages or logistics issues, and customers benefit from reduced hardware footprint, and avoidance of service provider installer visits.
Reducing service delivery from 90 days to 90 seconds
The vCPE concept was so attractive to BT Global Services that the advantages could be summed up in one simple phrase “From 90-days to 90-Seconds”* - elimination of 90-days equipment transit time, and 90-seconds to remote boot an on-premises server pre-loaded with the software versions of the appliances required to turn up the service.
Not only was BT Global Services able to dramatically reduce the time required to connect a remote customer location, but the software could be updated remotely to add functionality and new features as they became available, thereby assuring customers that their evolving needs would be supported by remote software upgrade without service interruption. Moreover, service resilience can be boosted by uCPE configured with multi-path SD-WAN connectivity such as an LTE connection if the fixed broadband connection goes down.
Conclusion
The vCPE use case enabled telecom operators to quickly leverage the benefits of NFV. It also enabled my team at BT to convince the wider industry to adopt the technology because the benefits of consolidating multiple single-function appliances onto a single high-volume industry standard server were easy to understand.
Of course, NFV technology has matured considerably in the 8-years since our vCPE PoC; not only has the terminology evolved, but the telecom industry is able to leverage the latest cloud technologies as we outlined in our original NFV vision paper.
The main uCPE use case today is managed SD-WAN which enables home workers and branch offices to have resilient and secure connectivity to their corporate networks, and managed service providers are beginning to deploy value-added services such as video analytics running on the same uCPE device, both to boost revenues and create customer stickiness. If you’re interested in learning more about this topic then I’d recommend the Complete Guide to Deploying uCPE by Enea.
With proven benefits, rapidly maturing technology and low cost ‘white box’ hardware, it isn’t a surprise that service providers globally are embracing uCPE.
*The tag line “90-days to 90-seconds” was created by Peter Willis, Senior Manager Software Based Networks Applied Research, BT
