Telus: SDN Gives Us a Dynamic, Automatically Controlled Network

NFV is a key enabler of 5G, according to Telus’ Bryce Mitchell, director of NFV, cloud, and innovation labs at the Canadian telecommunication company.In terms of 5G, NFV allows service providers to virtualize all the appliances in the network, and it enables network slicing. And both of these illustrate the increased flexibility and new services that NFV allows which is why Telus started working on virtualizing its network in the first place back in 2015.“We were looking to create a more flexible framework that we can deliver services on, to innovate on — really that’s one of our primary motivations,” Mitchell said, adding that a more flexible environment will allow it to be more agile and deploy new services easier and faster. “That is part and parcel with the 5G stuff that is motivating us.”The second reason is cost savings on the capex and opex side of things. “NFV is really about driving down costs, be that costs of hardware or costs of operations,” he said. But despite these benefits, it wasn’t always an easy transition. In addition to “a few technical bruises,” Telus struggled with cultural change among its employees as it deployed virtualization technologies. “Even just the shift to software is a fairly significant shift in culture for a telecom provider,” Mitchell said. “We were grappling with a number of things internally: how do we address and embrace some of the opportunities that a purely software world gives us?”Service providers are used to long project timelines and fairly static environments that updated maybe a couple of times per year. Shifting to software and a virtualized network allowed for more frequent updates and new services, but it also required a shift in Telus’ processes and its employees’ mindsets.Part of the way the company overcame this cultural obstacle was to start small, Mitchell said. “Rather than trying to do big, sweeping, all-encompassing change, we said let’s take some small focus teams and expand out. Get some successes under our belts and show people how new processes and ways of working can help unlock value.”