Recently I revisited a blog I wrote in 2015 (see below), prompted by Appledore’s attendance at SDN and NFV World Congress (see NFV Market at a Crossroad) Deja Vous all over again What surprised me in re-reading this was how little has changed in our industry in 3 years. 5G still seems to be primarily about radio technology upgrade. NFV, where it is being deployed, is largely being used to replicate existing physical network infrastructures or creating limited evolutions of connectivity services and being deployed into the existing manually intensive operational environment. Appledore believe that this limited innovation and limited automation is meaning that the benefits of software enabled networks is not being realised. It is creating an environment in which investment in software enabled networks (beyond a network replacement technology) is being questioned. Appledore explores this issue and possible remedies for this in our new market outlook “Cloud Native – a revolution postponed” https://appledoreresearch.com/report/cloud-native-a-revolution-postponed/ Why NFV should Lose the N Telecom’s positioning of NFV (Network Function Virtualization) as a distinct concept distracts from the real opportunities in virtualization. It will ultimately limit the applicability of these network functions to simply replicating what existing networks do – and miss the real potential. NFV […]