november 2015 fiercecable migrating to sdn and nfv: … to sdn and nfv: how cable msos can benefit...

Migrating to SDN and NFV: How Cable MSOs can Benefit from Network Virtualization

FierceCableAn eBook from the editors ofNovember 2015

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2 Editor’s Note

3 SDN and NFV: Multiple Business Models and Major Challenges

5 Sponsored Content: Why Adopt Virtualization for Commercial CPE

6 Migrating Toward SDN and NFV

8 Interoperability Is A Necessity When Deploying SDN, NFV

12 NFV and SDN: Keys to Cable Business and Wholesale Automation

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Migrating to SDN and NFV: How Cable MSOs can Benefit from Network Virtualization // November 2015

Editor’s Note

SDN and NFV: Multiple Business Models and Major Challenges

Sponsored Content: Why Adopt Virtualization for Commercial CPE

Migrating Toward SDN and NFV

Interoperability Is A Necessity When Deploying SDN, NFV

NFV and SDN: Keys to Cable Business and Wholesale Automation

FierceCableAn eBook from the editors ofshare:

Editor’s Note

By Sue Marek Editor-in-Chief /// FierceCable

Cable operators are turning to software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) as a way to deploy complex services more quickly but at the same time decrease their operational costs.

But MSOs are moving to virtualized networks gradually while at the same time maintaining their legacy networks. The reason for the guarded approach to SDN and NFV is so that they don’t have to rip out existing customer premises equipment (CPE), which would be a costly and massive undertaking.

But there are many benefits to using SDN and NFV. With virtualized set-top boxes and home gateways, cable operators can deliver services on demand. In the enterprise environment, SDN and NFV will allow customers to adjust their Ethernet bandwidth on the fly or add ports and make other changes.

CableLabs, of course, plays a key role in the move to SDN and NFV. The organization is working with

the OpenDaylight project, which is part of the Linux Foundation. Its purpose is to develop open source, full-stack SDN from physical switches to virtual network appliances that can support multiple network environments as well as applications.

Specifically, OpenDaylight is hoping to create a platform that not only will support existing hardware but will also be interoperable – so multiple vendors can support the standard without creating proprietary solutions.

Comcast is a member of OpenDaylight Project and one of the first cable operators to use Cisco’s cBR-8 Evolved Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP) product, a platform that includes support for SDN.

This eBook from FierceCable takes a look at some of the challenges and benefits of SDN for cable operators and explores potential business cases for moving to a virtualized network environment. n







Editor’s Note







SDN and NFV: Multiple Business Models and Major Challenges MSOs increasingly view the virtualization as crucial for the future of their networks, but there’s little consensus about why that is.

By Colin Gibbs

Cable multi-system operators (MSOs) are increasingly pursuing SDN and NFV as tools to help manage their networks more efficiently, deliver new features and offerings, and give customers more control over services in their homes and businesses. IHS recently predicted that the market for SDN software, hardware and services will explode from $103 million in 2014 to $5.7 billion in 2019, with widespread commercial deployments beginning to come online next year.

IHS released a report earlier this year that found 35 percent of service providers globally are planning to deploy NFV in 2015, and 48 percent plan to evaluate the technology by year-end. But even as some operators are expected to announce commercial deployments in the coming months, there’s little consensus about how to roll out the technologies – and how to monetize them.

“Everyone who’s getting into (SDN and NFV) knows they have to be in it, but they’re scrambling to figure out what the best business model is, what the best business

plan is, how it’s going to work for them,” said Brian Washburn, Current Analysis’ global service director for business network and IT services.

The importance of virtual CPE Indeed, the adoption of SDN and NFV could give birth to a wide variety of business models, and MSOs are already experimenting with several ways to monetize the technologies. Virtualized networks can enable cable companies to increase capacity on the fly, for instance, allowing them to temporarily widen channels between geographic markets and then dial back down once massive amounts of data have been transported. While there isn’t a huge amount of demand for such activity – not yet, at least – it underscores the kind of network flexibility SDN and NFV can provide.

These new technologies are also already being used to support network security functions. Firewall, on-demand







Editor’s Note







>> SDN and NFV: Multiple Business Models and Major Challenges

malware protection, and cloud-based web application and development testing are among the security functions SDN and NFV can support.

One of the most compelling aspects of SDN and NFV, though, will occur through virtual customer premises equipment (CPE). MSOs could leverage virtualization to encourage their customers to tweak their services on the fly, reducing or increasing bandwidth as necessary through a user interface on the company’s secure portal. That would not only give the end user greater control over his or her services, it could help the MSO manage the network more efficiently by temporarily altering network capacity as needed.

MSOs are hoping that model might appeal to mid-sized, centralized organizations such as hospitals, school districts and some retail chains. On-demand bandwidth has actually been around for about 20 years, Washburn said, but the concept has never gained any substantial traction. That could change, though, if virtualization makes it easy for consumers to adjust their services at will – and if service providers can come up with billing

policies that encourage those users to throttle down when they can.

“The beauty of this solution is that it really helps both sides,” said Robert Haim, principal analyst at ACG Research. “If the operator sees it has additional resources, that becomes very elastic. They can scale up or down. In other words they can increase memory, storage, network bandwidth resources based on the policies that the subscriber or enterprise wants.”

The emergence of virtual CPE also promises to save MSOs enormous amounts in customer care costs. Rather than sending technicians into the field every time service problems occur in a residence or enterprise, MSOs can manage and provision equipment remotely from a call center.

Paving the way for innovation Finally, SDN and NVF will make it easier for MSOs to experiment with new features and services with minimal investments, Haim said. So cable operators can devise innovative new offerings, quickly killing those that fail in the marketplace and then figuring out how to monetize the successes.

“Service agility is a gold mine for cable operators,” Haim said. Developing and deploying a service on legacy systems could take nearly a year, “then if the service doesn’t fly you’ve spent all this money and time and effort, and your investment gives you nothing. But if you do it in a virtual mode you can do it within weeks, or faster. So if you do fail, that’s OK, your investment is not so great you would lose sleep over it. You’re free to try as many things that come to your mind.” n

“Everyone who’s getting into (SDN and NFV) knows they have to be in it, but they’re scrambling to figure out what the best business model is, what the best business plan is,

how it’s going to work for them.”

BRIAN WASHBURN, CURRENT ANALYSIS’ GLOBAL SERVICE DIRECTOR FOR BUSINESS NETWORK AND IT SERVICES







Sponsored Content

As cable multi system operators (MSOs) respond to the ever growing competitive pressures on their residential subscribers from OTT video providers such as Netflix, Hulu and Amazon, as well as broadband providers such as Google and telcos, they’ve started offering business services to boost their revenue potential. While cable operators have found success in offering business services including Ethernet VPNs, voice, video, and broadband, they must create more compelling services and bundles for commercial subscribers as the competition is rising and these services are becoming commodities.

Creating more robust services and bundles quickly, cheaply and easily, will be possible once cable MSOs leverage virtualized services. By making the use of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), operators can realize the benefits of a flexible and agile architecture that seamlessly orchestrates business services across hybrid access networks.

Typically, cable operators are not dynamic in nature where they rapidly adopt new technologies in order to deliver compelling new services. But operators realize that virtualization is

becoming an integral component of their business services offering differentiation, service velocity, personalization, cost reductions, and scale.

To meet near-term goals, it is vital for operators to leverage NFV at the cable edge. Virtualization of customer premise equipment (CPE) allows the operators to do much more with much less and realize the return on investment quicker.

With traditional commercial CPE devices, operators are supporting dozens of deployment models making it difficult to implement changes across all of them, especially for new service rollout. By implementing a virtualized CPE (vCPE) for business customers, operators remove the complexity, costs of upgrading, and the need for customer interaction. By relocating value added CPE functions into a data center, the CPE becomes a simple device or a bridge with OSI layer-2 functionality that communicates with the operator’s network and provides a path for extending cloud-based services to the business customer. The value added services (VAS) that can be delivered via cloud include virtual firewall, virtual router, VPN, network address translation, intrusion detection and much more.

vCPE brings major benefits when there is a need to deploy new technology advancements, such as DOCSIS 3.1 and IPv6. It removes the need to upgrade the CPE as the functions reside in the cable operator’s network and the simple CPE device is IPv4/IPv6 agnostic. As for current business subscribers, replacement CPE devices are not required, as existing routed CPE devices can be reconfigured to operate in this virtualized environment.

However, virtualization alone is only a first step towards creating and operationalizing a true platform for revenue growth from value-added services. To operationalize and monetize vCPE requires bringing together seamless orchestration, dynamic VAS service chaining, evolved OSS/BSS, and self-service all in one environment. With the right platform, operators can smoothly and quickly integrate new business services in their offerings portfolio while drastically cutting costs, meeting sophisticated business customer requirements, minimizing service delivery times, building revenue-generating partnerships and improving their ability to compete in their respective markets. n

Why Adopt Virtualization for Commercial CPE By Kirk George, Director of Strategy, NetCracker Technology


Editor’s Note







Migrating Toward SDN and NFV MSOs are undeniably working to virtualize their networks, but they’re doing so gradually to minimize risk as they continue to lean on legacy systems.

By Colin Gibbs

Multi-system (MSO) operators have differing strategies and priorities as they move toward SDN and NFV. But even if SDN and NFV are the future of cable – and they clearly are positioned to be – that future won’t occur overnight. Rather than rushing toward these new technologies, cable companies are mapping out their next moves and developing deliberate timelines for integrating them.

“I believe you’re seeing MSOs maintain their legacy systems,” said Sree Koratala, head of SDN, IP and NFV Solutions for Ericsson North America. “We’re seeing a measured approach; they’re not abandoning their legacy systems. We also see the larger players having a bit more of an aggressive approach than the smaller players.”

The reason for that is twofold: Much of the movement toward SDN and NFV will occur in customer premises equipment (CPE), and operators aren’t eager to spend time and money ripping out hardware that may be relatively new and functioning properly. Secondly, larger

MSOs serve huge audiences – Comcast alone claims more than 20 million TV subscribers – so major network upgrades are a massive undertaking, particularly at the CPE level.

Step-by-step integration MSOs hope SDN and NFV will help them create more complex, cloud-based networks that serve customers more intelligently as they decrease operational costs. For instance, the technologies could be used to identify which devices are being used in specific ways – a child’s tablet, an adult’s iPhone, or a laptop used for work – and route them separately to the appropriate place in the cloud.

It’s worth noting that 85 percent of respondents in a recent HIS survey of cable providers that have deployed, are planning to deploy or evaluate software-defined networking by the end of 2016 said they expect data center network operating expenses to decrease “significantly” by the second year of SDN deployment.







Editor’s Note







>> Migrating toward SDN and NFV

A prior study by IHS found that simplifying and automating service provisioning was the primary reason service providers are investing in SDN. The operators said they hope SDN leads to increased service agility and faster time to revenue, although they cited integrating SDN into existing networks and immature technologies and products as the two largest barriers.

But while they have lofty expectations for virtualized networks, service providers are planning gradual deployments through incremental investments to ensure the technologies meet those expectations and improve the bottom line.

“Carriers are starting small with their SDN deployments and focusing on only parts of their network to ensure they can get the technology to work as intended,” said Michael Howard, senior research director for carrier networks at IHS, in a prepared statement. “We see in the results of our SDN survey that though momentum is strong, it will be many years before we see bigger parts or a whole network that is controlled by SDN.”

Another potential speed bump on the road to SDN and NFV adoption is the integration with existing OSS and BSS systems. Those platforms will have to be agile and flexible enough to continue to manage current network services even as they begin to support new virtualized systems, according to Justin Wood, marketing manager at Sigma Systems.

“If the goal is to quickly adopt and launch these new services alongside traditional network offerings, most legacy BSS/OSS systems will struggle to realize the true

benefits of NFV and SDN,” Wood wrote in a blog post earlier this year. “With a new set of network functions, and an entirely different set of resources to work with, it is crucial that the BSS/OSS layer is governed by a unified enterprise product, service and resource catalog.” MSOs that separate that data and keep it in silos risk minimizing the value virtualized networks can deliver, Wood said.

Talent is scarce Deploying and integrating SDN and NFV are certainly major challenges, but MSOs also face challenges beyond the merely technical. The industry will have to cultivate a talent pool of dev/ops personnel who understand SDN and NFV and can effectively integrate it with legacy systems. MSOs that can identify and recruit those individuals will have a substantial advantage as SDN and NFV mature beyond the testing stages and into real-world deployments.

Ericsson’s Koratala also noted that the emergence of SDN and NFV could help cable MSOs pursue their MVNO plans, helping them to compete with wireless carriers directly. But she said a major acquisition such as Charter’s proposed tie-up with Time Warner Cable could hinder the market if the companies opt to shelve their pursuit of the technologies while they work through the logistical complexities of a large-scale merger.

“Certainly major mergers will have an impact; we’ve seen a lot of that in the service provider segment, where (ambitious initiatives) can get put on hold,” Koratala observed. “With any major transformation – and SDN, NFV, the cloud is for sure a major transformation – technology is just one piece.” n







Editor’s Note







Interoperability Is A Necessity When Deploying SDN, NFV CableLabs is joining forces with many related industry groups to carve out standards that will promote an open source environment.

By Tara Seals

Network functions virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN) are two separate but related technologies that will underpin the network architecture of the future. In much the same way that cloud architectures have changed computing for enterprises, the combination of these two technologies has the potential to spur enormous changes to the cable MSO business case: lower costs, decreased (or nearly non-existent) customer provisioning time and the acceleration of new service introductions. SDN and NFV will also allow increased automation and customer self-service, thereby reducing trouble tickets and operating costs.

It’s important that the cable industry implement NFV and SDN in an interoperable, common, open-source way, in order to better gain management efficiencies. To that end, CableLabs, the primary standards body for the group, has been working on SDN and NFV standards since 2012, in concert with related bodies

like the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF), OPNFV and OpenDaylight.

OpenDaylight: the SDN Angle Some of CableLabs’ most important work is with the OpenDaylight project, which exists under the auspices of the Linux Foundation. Its purpose is the development of open-source, full-stack SDN approach, from physical switches to virtual network appliances, which can support multiple network environments as well as applications.

“OpenDaylight was created to be that platform that everyone can rally around—to provide a place where the whole industry can come together and build SDN controllers off of our code base,” said Nicolas “Neela” Jacques, executive director of OpenDaylight. “We don’t need 30 different vendors building their own SDN controllers from scratch, none of which are interoperable. We want to prevent vendor lock.”







Editor’s Note







>> Interoperability is a necessity when deploying SDN, NFV

Critically, the project has focused on accommodating existing hardware plants, with the ability to use those plants for a flexible range of services.

“Cable MSOs want to manage their infrastructure and network performance better and boost customer service, but they can’t just replace all of their hardware at once to do SDN and virtualization,” Jacques said. “We believe controllers should work with everything that’s out there, so we’ve made it possible for anyone to write their own southbound API to work with the hardware they need.”

For instance, allowing cable MSOs to control their cable modems with OpenDaylight SDN APIs was one of the group’s first success stories.

“One of the biggest costs that cable faces is the problem of sending people out to houses and businesses,” Jacques said. “Cablecos give a four-hour window—and their customer is waiting around, for one thing, but the other issue is that you don’t know if it’s going to be a two-minute fix or a two-hour fix. Scheduling

appointments and using those resources more efficiently is a game-changer and made possible by simply being able to measure better what’s going on with a customer’s service ahead of time.”

In addition, OpenDaylight has built its code to include a service-abstraction layer between the hardware and the applications. “There are six or seven immediate SDN use cases, but it can be used for a whole set of network services that are pluggable, so we created one standard API,” Jacques said.

He added, “We allow for innovation so that different vendors can go in different directions, but they all can work from the same code base and use the same APIs to establish interoperability.”

Existing Projects CableLabs is working on several different standardization projects in the virtualization arena, involving both OpenDaylight and OPNFV. One of those is virtualizing of the DOCSIS network via management interfaces for CMTS and CCAP devices; another is investigating the feasibility of using the PacketCable multimedia plug-in for OpenDaylight, so that it can control legacy CMTS as the industry moves forward. PacketCable was originally developed to allow policy management for VoIP. Now, CableLabs is looking into repurposing it. CableLabs is also running two virtual CPE trials—one for business and one for residential. For the former, it’s looking at virtual metro Ethernet private line VPN

“You will see more operators making an investment in terms of dedicating resources to standards and working to understand what benefits engaging in open source has for them.

CHRIS DONLEY, DIRECTOR OF ADVANCED NETWORKS AND APPLICATIONS AT CABLELABS







Editor’s Note








provisioning, in tandem with the Metro Ethernet Forum to make sure it aligns with the MEF’s lifecycle service orchestration (LSO) initiative. On the residential side, the trial has to do with virtual parental controls.

“We are developing prototypes and contributing those into both OPNFV and OpenDaylight,” said Chris Donley, director of advanced networks and applications at CableLabs.

Virtualization has changed the standards process, according to Donley. “Historically we have always defined specifications internally and then used those to develop standards with external groups,” he explained. “But that was because there are hardware dependencies—for instance, the next version of DOCSIS has an impact on silicon, so getting it wrong is risky and expensive for everybody. It’s important to build a consensus upfront, before that silicon is built.”

With the rise of software, this process can almost be reversed. “We can do things almost backwards, with the implementations first. From there, we can compare the different implementations from different vendors, and then write the standards to define consensus—after the consensus has been built,” Donley said.

Forward Progress While telcos—especially AT&T and Korea Telecom—have been ahead in NFV and SDN adoption, Donley said that he expects cable operators to quickly move from the education phase, to doing internal proof of concepts (PoCs), to external PoCs and trials.

“In some cases, our members are taking this solution-by-solution, and in some cases strategically, but one of the challenges across the board is managing the strategy across groups,” Donley said. “Some are looking at VPNs, some are looking at cloud services…quickly you can end up with a hundred good solutions that are all different from each other. Management and spotting/diagnosing problems across those solutions is a nightmare. So most companies want to start from the top and impose some level of standardization at this point to avoid that.”

So far, their efforts are coalescing around four major use cases: The ability to gain visibility and do basic configurations from a logically centralized location, for maintenance or traffic rerouting; the ability to do proactive and reactive traffic management via programmatic control of the network; virtual CPE; and cloud-based content caching, especially as over-the-top (OTT) and 4K content traffic continues to escalate.

“You will see deployments pick up in next 18 months,” Donley said. “And you will see more operators making an investment in terms of dedicating resources to

“We don’t need 30 different vendors building their own SDN controllers from scratch, none of which are interoperable. We want to prevent vendor lock.”

NICOLAS “NEELA” JACQUES, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF OPENDAYLIGHT







Editor’s Note







standards and working to understand what benefits engaging in open source has for them. Organizations focused on standards can get code down quickly—and these are the ones driving the movement.”

Comcast for example has 15 to 20 dedicated people for OpenStack summits, he noted. “They realized that if they’re going to have major parts of the infrastructure invested in open-source software, it needed to also make an investment in a sort of Office of Open Source that can serve multiple divisions within Comcast. Developers, R&D, lawyers, community facilitators—this includes

a whole set of people. I forecast that we’re going to see more and more of this, which will only help standards processes.”

Standardization efforts, Jacques said, are uniquely advanced in the cable world. “The cable industry is distinctive because they have invested a lot in a level of standardization via CableLabs and others,” Jacques said. “The competitive landscape is advantageous in this way; they don’t compete with each other, so they put group funds into R&D, earmarked solely for thinking about the long-term needs of the cable industry.” n








Editor’s Note







NFV and SDN: Keys to Cable Business and Wholesale Automation Business services and wholesale are the fastest growing and most lucrative areas for cable.

By Tara Seals

Cable operators have been aggressively expanding their fiber networks and increasing speeds on their coax plant so they can take advantage of new business and wholesale opportunities. As they scale, both network function virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN) will be integral in allowing them to automate the service functions via virtualization, and thus differentiate themselves from CLECs and ILECs.

NFV allows services that traditionally are provided by physical customer premise equipment (CPE) to be sent to a cloud-based data center environment; network functions are, as the moniker suggests, virtualized in software in a centralized environment. From there, they can be extended into a customer premise using virtual CPE.

That creates an immense operational benefit for cable MSOs from the outset, which rely on a cable modem plus additional boxes at the customer premise to achieve

things like firewalling, VPNs and the provisioning of managed Ethernet services—among other functions. NFV eliminates that requirement.

“If you don’t have to install a second CPE box, and you don’t have that truck roll, it becomes better for internal operational efficiency and will be more cost-effective for customers,” said Craig Cowden, chief network officer and senior vice president of enterprise solutions at Bright House Networks.

Converged plant strategies This is especially important as cable networks get faster, and as operators look to converged plant strategies.“Cable is now starting to support 1 Gbps on existing coax infrastructure—so we have all this capacity on the last mile that they want to monetize,” said Andrew Smith, senior director and distinguished engineer at Juniper Networks. “And they want to go up-market







Editor’s Note







and compete with telcos. Business services is the fastest-growing arena for cable and offers the highest revenue-per-bit—but they also need to maintain their video-centric, residential-first focus. MPLS over coax, enabled by NVF and SDN, can enable a truly converged residential and commercial network. I think that coax will be seen as a legitimate technology for backhaul within 18 months, and a legitimate vector for commercial services,” he added.

Against this backdrop, NFV can also add value to packets where there wasn’t much before, he added.

“When all advanced packet processing moves to the data center, and the connection to that data center is fast enough to do real-time content filtering, VPNs, Wi-Fi extensions, firewalls and so on, it becomes clear that NFV combined with multi-gigabit last mile is a symbiotic combination—one will drive the other,” Smith said.

Further, SDN, via SDN controllers, can be responsible for the orchestration of services across available virtual

inventory, OSS and back office systems, and network elements, and can do it in a centralized, automated way. By applying SDN to a virtualized network environment, provisioning becomes automated and programmatic, so that the network spins up virtual resources as needed, within seconds. The result is the game-changing ability to enhance order turn-up times for Ethernet, coax and fiber services to the point of being on-demand.

Real-World Plans Already, some cablecos are beginning to operationalize these concepts. Bright House for instance has mounted a three-pronged push to deploy NFV and SDN in its commercial services environment, with residential to follow.

In what Cowden dubs a “pre-SDN” phase, Bright House is using its existing OSS tools to implement scripted automation to streamline the provisioning of Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF)-based services. “We offer E-Line, E-LAN and so on, but today it’s a manual effort, and provisioning takes one to two days,” Cowden said. “Using scripted automation of existing tools, we are starting to implement the fundamental concept of what SDN is. And that offers not only a business benefit, but also a cultural benefit in terms of preparing employees and divisions for doing things differently than we have in the past.”

In the second phase, Bright House will implement a true SDN controller into its environment. Field trials will begin in the first quarter of 2016, and a production rollout is planned for the second half of 2016.

>> NFV and SDN: Keys to Cable Business and Wholesale Automation

“If you don’t have to install a second CPE box, and you don’t have that truck roll, it becomes better for internal operational efficiency and will be more cost-effective for customers.”

CRAIG COWDEN, CHIEF NETWORK OFFICER AND SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT OF ENTERPRISE SOLUTIONS AT BRIGHT HOUSE NETWORKS







Editor’s Note







“This is where we will start to automate the data center environment and instantiate true virtualized services, including virtual firewall, virtual intrusion detection, bandwidth-on-demand and true business services over DOCSIS,” Cowden explained.

And finally, the third phase will see the operator link SDN with order management and its billing/back office functions. Scheduled for lab trials next year and a production phase in 2017, this will allow instantaneous customer provisioning of commercial services, and at scale.

This will also allow true service agility, because the product development lifecycle will shrink.

“Here you have a platform that can automate new services,” Cowden said. “Today, one of the longest lead times for provisioning is integrating services into a back office that’s rife with manual integration points. In a full NFV/SDN environment, the product ideation can happen in tandem with the service rollout.”

Cox Communications, meanwhile, is deploying NFV and SDN in its national backbone and core network.

“What we’re looking at initially is to drive network efficiencies and operational cost reductions,” said Jeremy Bye, the MSO’s vice president of wholesale and national accounts. “We need a strategy for the long-term management of bandwidth utilization, which is clipping along at a 50 percent year-over-year.”

Reducing Hardware NFV reduces the network’s hardware footprint, by running functions on virtual stacks inside standard “white-box” servers, while boosting density.“The cable challenge is scale,” said John Chapman, engineering fellow and CTO of Cisco’s Cable Access Business Unit. “They want to go deeper with fiber and segment their plant to offer dedicated bandwidth channels that can be used for specific services—a unique differentiator to offer enterprise services. However, offering a range of speeds from 100 Mbps service to Gigabit service presents a big challenge, because that represents five to 10 times the density that they have today.”

Chapman added, “They still need to make everything fit within their hubs—so it becomes a power and real estate problem. So, they need a box that’s five to 10 times denser—and that’s where NFV can come in.”

Down the road, Cox will look to drive more automation into its backbone, and to leverage SDN for better intelligence in providing 10G and 100G services for carriers.

“We’re looking at automated restoration services and an intelligent grid where we can map 10- and 100-gig routes with more of a mesh-style network capability, beyond the A-to-B backup routes that we have today. I think that when we offer built-in, automated resiliency where the network manages itself, that provides a higher value for carriers than our competition. It provides additional value beyond cost.”








Editor’s Note







Overhauling Backhaul Wireless backhaul is one area where this will become important. As Cisco’s Chapman noted, “Leasing to mobile operators is an interesting SDN problem, because you have to guarantee performance between two large providers.”

For Cox, wireless backhaul represents a little more than 50 percent of its wholesale market segment. Here, the ability to provide a more efficient network solution to lower costs is an immediate benefit, but over time, the ability to scale its wireless backhaul business will hinge on performance management across heterogeneous networks.“This is huge for cable, given the domain and range of their fiber and coax networks,” Smith said. “Their footprints span so far and reach so deep already, so backhaul is a natural fit. And as they bring on more macrocell and microcell sites, the automation and efficiency that SDN will afford them will be required. The need to virtualize and automate the topology across all of those disparate networks will allow them to meet the strict criteria for resiliency imposed by wholesale partners.”

In the future, Cox’ Bye said that he would like to leverage SDN to deliver bandwidth-on-demand with performance management visibility, in a very customer-friendly way via APIs.

“We use Web-enabled apps to share performance monitoring with our carrier partners today, so they can see how their networks are performing,” Bye said. “I’d love to see the ability to leverage SDN to do more

with bandwidth-on-demand and tying ordering and provisioning to performance for the ultimate view. These are network orchestration types of discussions—and represent a longer-term vision for us.”

Gating Factors Although SDN/NFV deployments are starting to emerge in the market, there are challenges. And one of the biggest looming limitations is the cultural migration that goes along with the shift in architecture.

“The people that run our networks today are used to using command-line interfaces and other tools for service initiation, troubleshooting and more,” explained Bright House’s Cowden. “But in the future, those processes get automated and abstracted from their typical process. So as an organization, we’re going from a network operations set of skills to software skill sets. And that’s a big change.”

Interoperability among SDN controllers is another hurdle. While standards bodies are working to eliminate this challenge, the fact remains that cable MSOs may have different controllers from different vendors for different parts of the business. Controllers need to be able to interface with existing and new device types

“What we’re looking at initially is to drive network efficiencies and operational cost reductions.”

JEREMY BYE, COX COMMUNICATIONS’ VICE PRESIDENT OF WHOLESALE AND NATIONAL ACCOUNTS








Editor’s Note







to allow service instantiation to extend across many vendors’ equipment.

“A real concern in the industry is the possibility that this disruptive, transformational moment will be used as an opportunity for vendor lock-in,” Smith said. “I think we would miss a huge moment in advancing the state of the art of these networks if that happens. Cable MSOs should mandate and demand open networks. ”

It’s clear, however, that the value that NFV and SDN bring in the form of scale and business services automation will almost require cable MSOs to overcome obstacles to make the architecture transformation.

“Over time, within five to 10 years, I think that SDN and NFV will be just integr.al networking concepts and will represent the architectures that all MSOs and telcos are adopting,” Cowden said. n







november 2015 fiercecable migrating to sdn and nfv: … to sdn and nfv: how cable msos can benefit...

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