Operators should move steadily towards virtualisation in order to overcome the technical, operational and commercial hurdles facing them, a new report has claimed.
According to solutions provider OneAccess, operators should be patient with their virtualisation projects, taking orchestration and OSS/BSS into account. It recommended operators embark on a strategy “in a commercially viable manner” and within a “realistic time frame”.
Pravin Mirchandani, CMO of OneAccess, said that while many operators saw virtualisation as a necessary end-goal, many struggled with establishing an achievable migration strategy.
In an interview with European Communications last December, Mirchandani claimed that telcos needed to completely overhaul their structural organisations in order to successfully implement NFV.
Mirchandani said: “Given the exponential growth in the volume of their customers’ traffic, as well as its increasing volatility, many operators now view the adoption of SDN and NFV as essential to maintaining commercial viability yet, for the majority, deployment remains an elusive goal.
“To date, one of the chief reasons for this has been the difficulty in charting a realistic migration strategy from where they are today.”
The provider has released a paper giving advice on how operators can overcome the challenges facing their virtualisation strategy. The paper, titled ‘A Pragmatic NFV Strategy for the Delivery of Enterprise Business Services’, provides a checklist that service providers can use to evaluate the suitability of each vendor to their needs.
According to a recent report from IHS, the move toward virtualised networks will take another 10-15 years.
However, the wait is expected to pay off as the NFV market is forecast to hit €10.7 billion by 2019.