Has virtualization become obsolete in 5G?

Sat Aug 1 15:36:30 UTC 2020

On 1/Aug/20 16:52, Etienne-Victor Depasquale wrote:
> But the point is just that: how serious is this progression towards
> cloud-native, if so much effort was put in to virtualization?

I suspect that if a significant amount of investment has already gone
into classic NFV, and for the most part, it's working reasonably well,
an operation would need to be seriously bored or have tons of cash and
time around to uproot all of that work and change things around without
some compelling technical or commercial reason to do so.

Despite the NFV world being well bedded in, it's still an evolving piece
of tech., and this is one field where operators are prone to spending
multiple times on the same thing, as they realize the previous decision
fell out of favour with the community or their favorite vendor.

I've seen it happen right here in South Africa, when a company built an
"SDN" platform 7 different times in 3 years as the industry kept
oscillating; going through whatever "SDN" platform vendors pushed, what
the open community was putting out, OpenStack, e.t.c.

They eventually closed down that side of the business, this year.

So for greenfield sites, maybe. But for existing installations that have
been around a while, I guess the transition to "cloud-native" might be a
bit of an ask, given the industry's history on this.

Mark.