
I spoke with Heather Kirksey, OPNFV director, who was supportive of China and its ability to collaborate globally. “The choice for China was intentional, we are a global organization. This is not a regional China event, it is our global event.” Kirksey pointed out that while travel expense, time and visas make it difficult to hold the event here, these are the same challenges that the Chinese face with US or European events. While it may be harder and more expensive for her organization, it pays dividends in bringing more collaboration and diversity, which are key to OPNFV success.
Collaboration between carriers is typically easier because regulation and geographic challenges limit conflict, but for equipment companies, the global market makes it more difficult for them to work with competitors. Yet the working group representation sees competitors like Ericsson and Huawei both working to achieve the same project goals. Inclusion and diversity were strong themes of the event.
Strong representation from China was expected as the home country for the event, but as I sat in the different sessions and interacted with the different working group members, it was easy to see the active participation by Chinese carriers and equipment vendors. With one of the largest and fastest growing telecom markets, China has an opportunity to break out, and the disruption that 5G will bring to the market is an interesting point of confluence for the country to take the lead.
These network changes will impact the carriers first, but eventually those technologies will move upstream into traditional enterprises. Carriers and cloud service providers not only have more complicated environments, but they better represent where enterprises are headed as cloud technology, containers and network virtualization are all areas of great interest for enterprises today. Any work that carriers can do in forwarding those technologies will eventually carry over into traditional enterprise environments, which is the opposite of how it worked in the past. Enterprises were faster at moving internet technologies and protocols into their environments, and carriers eventually moved from circuit switching to IP well after it was a business mainstay. The vision of the traditional carrier for many is a stodgy, conservative company delivering a dial tone, but carriers are changing, moving to the front of the technology curve, and much of the work that is being done to propel these businesses is coming from global collaboration with China.
As 5G changes the carrier landscape, we’ll see some key technologies like NFV act as the underpinning for the transition. Open source software—and now even open source hardware—will be critical components. Open source is all about public debate, and unlike previous transitions that were driven more by standards bodies driving consensus, the next generation of communications technology will be driven more by open source organizations like OPNFV, OpenStack, OpenDaylight, DPDK, FD.io, ONOSand ONAP as the underpinnings of 5G will be virtual and very cloud-centric. Collaboration has become the preferred mechanism for driving change, and China is stepping up as a major player in this movement, overcoming many of the language and cultural barriers that stymied sharing in the past