Sophia Antipolis, 14 March 2023

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of ETSI NFV, ETSI organized a conference on the “Evolution of NFV towards the next decade” on 6 and 7 March at its facilities. The face-to-face event provided a unique opportunity for the NFV community to reflect on their achievements in the past 10 years and on the way forward. Carriers, vendors, SDOs representatives, and stakeholders from the whole ecosystem came together to debate on challenges and opportunities. They also addressed how to increase the cooperation between various SDOs and the open-source communities to enhance interoperability and to smooth the deployment of cloudified network telecom functions.

Since the creation of the ETSI NFV ISG, network operators, CT&IT vendors, SMEs and core contributors from open-source, academia and research communities have been actively standardizing the NFV framework, which has become the benchmark telco cloud and network virtualization architecture.

ETSI’s Director-General, Luis Jorge Romero, gave the opening speech and pointed out that the introduction of NFV has greatly contributed to the benefits of 5G for global telecom consumers, and how the NFV standards have consolidated industry consensus. Yoshihiro Nakajima highlighted the community building based on openness and collaboration. Finally, Caroline Chappell, research director at Analysys Mason, stated in her keynote speech that carriers still have a long way to go in the transformation of telecom cloud-native networks and recommended that ETSI NFV should strengthen the introduction of IT technologies to serve the telecom cloud.

Global telecom operators, including BT, Softbank, China Mobile, Verizon and Docomo, shared their experience on NFV deployments for 4G and 5G, introducing future orientations. They were joined by Telefonica and T-Mobile for the panel that concluded the first session. The significance of security in cloud-based deployments, the need to solve the interoperability issues between various standards and open-source solutions and the importance of moving forward in a more agile way, were some of the key takeaways of the panel. At the end of the first day, the ISG NFV founders and key technical and leadership contributors were congratulated for their excellent work.    

The second session was dedicated to the numerous partnerships and collaborations established with ETSI ISG NFV. Speakers included Open Infrastructure Foundation, LFN, 3GPP SA5, other ETSI ISGs, ETSI OSM, O-RAN WG6 and NGMN, who shared their views on the fruitful cooperation between standards and open-source communities in various phases of their work. The panel concluded that interoperability was key as well as harmonization of standards and open-source solutions for avoiding overlapping and for the successful deployment of cloud-based telecom networks.

The last session was dedicated to the next steps of the ETSI ISG NFV: how it will evolve as a technology and continue to be a pillar for the telecommunications industry and network transformation.

It was the opportunity to present the latest two White Papers from ETSI NFV experts. The concluding panel brought together vendors such as AWS, Dell, Ericsson, Huawei and Wind River to discuss subjects including the future of NFV, important trends to consider, and new ideas from the telecom industry to take into consideration.

More information and presentations from the event: https://www.etsi.org/events/2154-evolving-nfv-towards-the-next-decade#pane-1/