Customers are seeking the advantages of cloud-based services for all areas of business functions including real-time voice, video, and unified communications. Service providers are having to meet these needs by evolving the way they deliver their services. In short, they’re migrating their own networks to more virtual formats to meet the rising demand of their customers.

This migration has benefits for everyone involved, both on the consumer side and for the provider. The most immediate benefit is that customers no longer need to host as much equipment on site, because most of that physical equipment has been replaced by the service provider. On the other side of the equation, the provider no longer has the expense of shipping equipment to the customer. And we’re only scraping the surface of the advantages for service providers that can include automated delivery and orchestration of services.

I spoke with Mykola Konrad, VP of Product Management and Marketing here at Sonus Networks to talk more in-depth on the topic of network function virtualization (NFV) technology and how this impacts online service delivery.

How is NFV Changing the Services of Provider Networks?

With NFV, network functions that once required dedicated hardware running specialized software can instead be delivered by software running on top of a virtual server in the service provider’s data center or point of presence (POP). Over time, service providers add an orchestration function that enables automated delivery of services to customers, such as through self-service portals – even when those services might span several provider POPs.

Adoption of NFV technology will cut operating costs significantly once a provider reaches network-wide virtual orchestration. There’s no guarantee that they’ll pass on those savings to the consumer, but competitive pressure may force their hand as competition grows.

Here at Sonus, where we specialize in security applications and session border controllers (SBCs), we’re seeing an increased interest in SBC as a Service. Konrad says this about the growing trend among our service provider customers: “Service providers are looking to transform their networks, of course to lower network costs, but more importantly to provide services more quickly and easily to their customers – that’s the driving factor here. They’re gradually virtualizing their networks and moving from the world of the last 20 to 30 years where they had to buy specialized hardware to bring applications to customers.”

If a service provider continues operating under the older model, they’ll have to put in new hardware in its own POP or at the customer site.  “They have to provision and maintain that hardware as well as the software on top of it,” Konrad noted. “It’s a relatively slow process and every time you want to do something new, you have to go through it again.”

Using NFV, a service provider can quickly start up new applications with the aid of a hypervisor on top of any server. No purpose-built hardware is needed.

The Service Provider with NFV: An Evolution in Process

As with all evolutions, this isn’t going to happen overnight, and service providers aren’t going to get rid of their legacy infrastructure right away. When I asked Konrad about this, he said that he thinks that service providers will take a gradual approach.

Let’s say a service provider is providing SIP trunking to 10,000 separate customers. This means that they’ll probably be shipping an SBC as customer premise equipment (CPE) to each site and turning it up. Under the new model of SBC-as-a-Service (SBCaaS), as additional customers come on board the provider could begin offering services from a virtual SBC sitting on a hypervisor in a POP and gradually migrate existing customers from the on-premise, hardware-based SBC to the virtual instance.

“Once you get to that kind of fully automated, orchestrated network, it enables the provider to bring up services more quickly, and do so at a lower cost,” Konrad says.

An example of a potential next step would be to have SBCaaS at different POPs around the country. Eventually there will be enough customer requests to the provider, and they can add orchestration software. A self-service portal would be useful here, and the orchestration software could process the request and implement the service served by different POPs.

NFV delivers wins for both sides. The customer no longer has to worry about equipment on their premises or its management, and their services are installed in minutes, as opposed to the older model of days or weeks. A service provider can expect increased agility when adding a new service or if a customer cancels service, as well as reduced operating costs.

Konrad pointed out that SBCaaS is only one example of the services a provider may offer their customer, and it’s a good place to start for most providers. The versatility of NFV is that it can be applied to almost any network application to fit the needs of any business, including IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) functions, video, or other unified communications applications.