Vodafone Germany Urges NFV Vendors to 'Step Up' Efforts

WUZHEN, China -- Operations Transformation Summit 2016 -- Vodafone Germany is aiming to virtualize 60% of its network functions by 2020, the operator revealed earlier today at a conference here, but says vendors will need to "step up" their own efforts if it is to realize its cloud ambitions.

Under its "Ocean" strategy, parent company Vodafone Group plc (NYSE: VOD) has made virtualization a priority and the German subsidiary already appears to have made substantial progress on the rollout. (See Vodafone Demands More From NFV Vendors and BCE 2016: Vodafone to Make Waves With Its 'Ocean' Virtualization Strategy.)

Vodafone Germany has about 30 million mobile users, as well as 6 million broadband and 7.8 million TV subscribers, and around 25 million of its customers are now being served using virtual network functions (VNFs), according to Soren Trebst, the operator's senior vice president of network operations.

The virtualization rollout has so far covered numerous voice and data functions, as well as OSS and services applications. It is supporting certain prepaid offerings, as well as VoIP and VoLTE products.

"We are targeting 60% of network functions on SDN and NFV by 2020," said Trebst during a presentation at Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. 's Operations Transformation Summit in Wuzhen earlier today.

Efforts so far have helped Vodafone Germany to reduce hardware maintenance costs by about 60%, but Trebst expects to realize much greater benefits through the "cloudification" of the business.

"We are talking about NFV but that is not the cloud," he told attendees at the Huawei event. "The big promise of the cloud is yet to come."

Keen to take full advantage of cloud-based technologies, Vodafone has come up with five key targets it is addressing. But it will not be able to realize these objectives without vendor support, acknowledges Trebst.

First, it wants to reduce the time it takes to "onboard" a VNF from six weeks to just two days. It also hopes that being able to allocate resources more efficiently will help it to reduce costs.

Related to that, a third goal is to better meet on-demand capacity requirements through the dynamic allocation of NFV infrastructure (NFVi) resources.

Another more concrete objective involves making usage of NFVi resources "site-independent." "It still takes a week to move an app from one site to another and that needs to go down to about 30 minutes," says Trebst.

A final and highly ambitious target is to provide support for end-to-end orchestration and what Trebst calls "full-scale automation." By doing that, Vodafone Germany reckons it will be able to reduce its current operating costs by 30-40%.

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Trebst told attendees that Vodafone Germany will have to collaborate with key vendors and the global engineering team of Vodafone Group to overcome some major hurdles in the next 12 months.

Orchestration, a bugbear for the industry at large, remains a huge concern for Trebst. "There are lots of promises but I've still not yet seen domain and services orchestration working as a live application," he says.

Another issue that Trebst identifies is the lack of cloud-ready applications. "Vendors really need to step up because lots of applications are still not cloudified," he complains.

Arguably the biggest challenge for Vodafone, along with other operators investing in SDN and NFV, is on the cultural side. While cloud-based technologies promise greater efficiency and flexibility, telcos will need to inculcate the appropriate skill sets and working practices in their organizations to really benefit.

"DevOps is the key word here but we don't really know how it will work out," says Trebst. "We're at the beginning of the journey to enhance operational skills."

— Iain Morris, , News Editor, Light Reading