NEWS

Operators Urged to Use Network Virtualisation just as ETSI Group Unveils Draft NFV Standards

August 13, 2014 - Aleks

With mobile network operators (MNOs) facing the conflicting challenges of rolling out new services faster than ever before, against a backdrop of legacy business and operations support systems (B&OSS), it’s no surprise that NFV has become a hot topic. Now the men and women drafting Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) standards have genuine progress to report, even as some vendors are delivering virtualised solutions to the market.  

URGENT NEED FOR STANDARDS

As we reported here on July 31, the recent Network Virtualisation & SDN World 2014 event highlighted the lack of industry standards for NFV (See: Network Virtualisation & SDN World 2014: CSPs confirm Analysys Mason's NFV and SDN forecasts. And as Glen Ragoonanan, lead analyst, Infrastructure Solutions & SDP at Analysys Mason said, the lack of standards “is preventing major vendors from developing APIs for OSS, NFV orchestrators and SDN controllers.”

Less than two weeks later there is progress to report following the 7th meeting of ETSI’s Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) Industry Specification Group (ISG), held in Santa Clara, California from July 29 to August 1. Following the meeting, co-hosted by Citrix and Ericsson, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute released nine draft NFV documents for industry comment, and a new leadership team was elected. Plans for the next phase of NFV were also laid down.

The nine draft documents made available for comment comprise the first release of NFV that will be published at the end of 2014. The ISG NFV has decided to make the draft specifications available to the industry at this stage to encourage feedback.

The documents released last week describe an infrastructure overview, the virtualised network functions architecture and the compute, hypervisor and infrastructure network domains. They also cover management and orchestration, resiliency, interfaces & abstractions, and security. These drafts are now available for industry comment.

 

Read more at Vanilla Plus

GET TO KNOW THE LATEST

How the 5G value plane will turn revenue dreams into reality

April 5, 2021

5G will spark re-invention in a defining year for telecoms

March 22, 2021

Standalone 5G – Service provider revenues will be driven by network-embedded services

February 1, 2021