NFV and Content at the Edge

December 22, 2015

2015 in Review

By Ernest Worthman —

Network virtualization made some real progress this year. Some of the largest mobile operators are getting virtual. Yet, much of this is in the “planning” stage and the general consensus is the 2016/17-time frame will see a rapid uptick in virtualization across a wide deployment landscape.

Keeping voluminous amounts of data flowing smoothly will not happen if everything has to flow to the central core. Edge computing keeps the data local as much as possible. This was talked about a lot in 2015 at various conferences and everybody is getting the message. Mobile Edge Computing application and content servers are showing up at the edge of the network with the radio and baseband. This reduces latency and improves network throughput since traffic does not have to traverse back to the EPC for processing. That means content can be delivered, quickly, to the mobile device and specific applications can be supported in specific locations. 2015 fueled the fires, 2016 is likely to produce some actual deployments.