IP disaggregation: The radical game changer

Two years ago, a global operator survey by Heavy Reading identified that 46% of respondents to their survey were expecting to undergo what they identified as “radical changes” to their IP networks. Fast forward to today and several factors are influencing this increasing desire for change with cost reduction, a move to cloud strategy, network scalability and vendor diversity being the main ones; according to a recent whitepaper by Heavy Reading.

With organisations such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google (the ‘hyperscalers’ as termed by Heavy Reading) migrating into the telecommunications industry, they are making public cloud widely more accessible.

Telecom Infra Project (the global community of companies and organizations working together to accelerate the development of open, disaggregated technology solutions) counted 33 transport disaggregation trials and deployments globally with marquee operator names including Vodafone, Airtel and Telefónica, as well as many others being involved. So, this really is an exciting time for the industry as change will be inevitable, competition will increase and the products to market will be of a higher standard.

What are biggest benefits to adopting disaggregated or cloud-native networking technologies?

• Virtualization (multiservice support over shared infrastructure)
• Architecture simplification
• Higher, more flexible scale
• Accelerated innovation
• No vendor lock-in

Christopher Lamb, Regional Head of our Asia business has noticed a number of clients increasingly talk about their support for disaggregation. “Several of my clients have indicated that they see disaggregated IP playing an increasingly important role in the 5G ecosystem. 5G allows much greater flexibility for end clients who can mix and match vendor equipment more than previously.”

From Asia to North America, IP disaggregation is certainly a hot topic, and it will be interesting to see how this develops over the coming months and years