2018 was hard work for the telecoms sector. NFV continued to be a hard slog and the race to 5G was on. But while telcos tried to solve problems in their usual thoughtful but slow way, IT raced ahead, using the cloud to jump complex technical problems and pave the way for a new cloud-based networking era.
#1: NFV will be superseded by Cloud Based Networking
NFV, which was designed around appliance virtualisation, will be replaced by Cloud-based Networking which has become a problem for telecoms and enterprise as cloud-native networking becomes the norm. Cloud-based networking’s popularity, driven by the demand for workloads to be run on public and private clouds, and helped along by companies such as IBM and Amazon, brings with it the requirement to figure out complex networking processes such as dynamic connectivity.
#2: Edge Cloud will become a reality
Brian Naughton,
CTO,
Accanto Systems
Today’s large data centres sit at the centre of the cloud, which means they’re multiple hops removed from the end user. This can cause issues with latency and incur increasing costs as the distance the data travels is managed.
To avoid quality and cost problems, a burgeoning category of applications and content, including video streaming, latency-sensitive apps, and security applications now need to be located across the network, closer to the edge and closer to the user. Edge infrastructure investments will significantly accelerate in 2019.
#3: Live 5G deployments, supported by Edge Cloud, will go into production
While there was a lot of talk about 5G in 2018, deployments didn’t quite make it to see the new year in. But, now that edge cloud is also finding its feet, the combination of edge and 5G means that fulfilling the demand for offering a greater, lower cost throughput, and the benefits of opening up the network, will all be drivers in making 5G happen at a faster rate.
#4: Telco standards will begin to disappear
2019 will start to see the decline of the telco standards such as ETSI and ONAP. The simpler, IT-founded cloud networking approach will replace the standardisation approach taken for NFV, which is too complicated and has been a hinderance rather than a help.
