A survey was conducted by Infonetics, a leading market research firm, with major operators representing 53% of worldwide telecom capex, to determine the timing and priority of the many use cases for their software-defined network (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) projects.
According to their 2013 'SDN and NFV Strategies: Global Service Provider Survey' report, major service providers are limiting the deployments of these two technologies to areas that can generate new services and thus, revenues. The study also highlighted that most operators intend to evaluate the possible deployment of SDN within the next 3 years while rating CDNs, IP multimedia subsystems (IMS) and virtual routers/security gateways as top applications for NFV.
“For the most part, carriers are starting small with their SDN and NFV deployments, focusing
on only parts of their network, what we call ‘contained domains,’ to ensure they can get the technology to work as intended,” explains Michael Howard, co-founder and principal analyst for carrier networks at Infonetics Research.
“But momentum for more widespread use of SDN and NFV is strong, as evidenced by the vast majority of operators participating in our who plan to deploy the technologies in key parts of their networks, from the core to aggregation to customer access,” continues Howard “Even so, we believe it’ll be many years before we see bigger parts or a whole network controlled by SDNs.”
