Rewind 10 years and the landscape of the telecoms industry was very different to what it is today, says Filip de Greve, product marketing manager at Nokia.

The use of data services, including bandwidth-hungry video apps, has grown exponentially and today supporting the unrelenting data growth isn’t even the only challenge anymore, with the “connected everything” trend leading to new data patterns. There has also been a shift from an Internet with global reach to one which needs to be much more locally optimised and automated.

Networks should be highly adaptive to the needs of the services being carried as well as to the needs of the customers being served and software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualisation (NFV) are generating significant interest in this area due to their promise of creating extremely flexible networks.

Both technologies arrived with high hopes and expectations (a.k.a. hype). To make software defined access networks (SDAN) a reality, though, requires an ability to extend the principles of NFV and SDN to access networks to make them more dynamic and responsive while ensuring they provide operational benefits.

Collaboration is king

Our approach to SDAN is about more than the technology. Despite what some of the hype suggests, sometimes it is the journey that teaches you about the destination.

Up until recently, the telecoms industry was accustomed to following protocol standards, bringing interoperability to networks, along with all the benefits that go with that such as choice of technology, lower price points and innovation. With a technology as new as SDN, the same level of standardisation doesn’t exist.

Initially, this made operators reluctant to commit to the new technology. In the early days of a new technology, it can be all too easy to unwittingly get caught up in a single vendor’s way of doing things. Nokia’s championing of the open and non-proprietary NETCONF/YANG protocol removes much of the risk of being an early adopter, creating reassurance that an industry-wide standard is on the way. This helps operators avoid problems like vendor lock-in down the line.

Software-defined networks, through their openness and advanced programmability, depend on collaboration. Nokia is working closely with network operators around the world to determine the most compelling real-world uses for SDAN. Operators are aware that proprietary software comes with costs, but so does open source.

Operators are looking for the smartest investment to harness the benefits of openness and programmability and move it forward across their network/IT operations. Nokia SDAN gets closest to what they want because operators can have a hand in making it. Furthermore, operators retain peace of mind as it has been conceived by people that know their networks inside-out and operators can leverage their existing investments in modern cloud platforms.

The current lack of standardisation around virtualisation means a new way of working for vendors and operators and we are actively feeding back on what we are doing with our customers, driving standardisation bodies towards pragmatic solutions. We collaborate with customers all over the world, defining and providing the industry with real-word use cases while leveraging free and open-source initiatives.

The author of this blog is Filip de Greve, product marketing manager at Nokia

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