Will Carriers Follow Facebook's Networking Lead?
Comment (7)Facebook is turning the normal relationship between network operators and vendors upside down. Is this a lead that service providers will follow, and if so, how far?
Traditionally, carriers signed a contract with a vendor, and the vendor provided everything and told the carrier what to do to keep its network running. It's like the relationship between your grandparents and their doctor -- the doctor told them to do something and they just did it, without asking questions or seeking a second opinion.
Now, leading carriers like AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) and Telefónica SA (NYSE: TEF) are partnering with vendors to virtualize networks with SDN and NFV. They're demanding accountability and asking questions and looking to play multiple vendors against each other.
But Facebook takes network leadership to the extreme. We talked with Omar Baldonado, manager of the social network's networking team, who described how Facebook has embraced open source and even applied open source principles to hardware, designing its own switches, writing networking software and even designing the data centers themselves.
Will service providers do the same? At least one analyst doesn't think so. Heavy Reading Analyst Roz Roseboro says that designing and managing network equipment is a huge personnel and education investment, one that carriers will be reluctant to jump into.
Still, Facebook provides an example to carriers of best practices for high-capacity networking, as well as how to use pressure from open source to keep proprietary vendors on their toes.
Find out how Facebook is building its own networks and leading global networking in a new Prime Reading report: Facebook Reinvents Data Center Networking.
— Mitch Wagner, 
, West Coast Bureau Chief, Light Reading. Got a tip about SDN or NFV? Send it to [email protected]
ATT and Verizon still have research arms who could certainly design and build their own equipment if they really wanted to spend the money on it. I don't think they see the worth in it anymore.
Enterprises are the ones who are apt to just deploy whatever turn-key solutions networking vendors sell them, in my experience.
These large companies (FB, GOOG, etc) are already well underway in building their own internal networking company (hw, sw, ems/sdn/insert acronym). Either they're going to continue to grow at a rate where that internal networking company can survive with a single customer (themselves), or they're eventually going to have to do something else with it. That's either a write-off or a spin-off or a new line of business. Leadership isn't generally a fan of write-offs unless they're new on the job and writing off someone else's mistakes. A new line of business is generally unrealistic as it means their competitors would have to buy from them. That leaves a spin-off as something that generally makes investors feel (temporarily) better.
From here, it looks like these companies are showing the same stupidity & arrogance of telecom operators from 30 years ago. I find it rather comical. Does that make me a bad person?
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But right now, the Facebooks & Googles of the world are still in the printing money stage. They have more money than they know what to do with, so they're plucking it down in whatever 'efficiency' operations they can. Once they start hitting crazy things like deregulation, competition, stagnation... their future COO will smartly jettison development efforts, calling it a spin-off, and create the next Lucent/Nortels of the world.
Facetel? Googworks? Give it 10-15 years...
