After five years of collaborating with the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, CableLabs has begun to roll out new standards aimed at simplifying deployment of network function virtualization (NFV) services in the last mile.
"I think this is going to be a massive acceleration of things," said Don Clarke, principal architect of network technologies for the cable technology consortium, to LightReading. While at British Telecom, Clarke co-authored the white paper that launched NFV.
As LightReading noted, two of the planned five standards have been published so far, with the final three coming before year’s end.
Clarke believes the standards will lead to faster development and deployment of technologies including virtual converged cable access platforms (CCAPS) and virtual content delivery networks and SD-WANs. He also sees innovative new applications, like augmented reality.
"If you've got an edge platform that runs carrier-grade functions in a standardized way ... that's all very boring, really, but necessary," Clarke added. "But what about the things that might generate new revenues and new core things that would be run on the same platform? So once we've dimensioned the platform for network connectivity ... now we say: What resources are needed to run some really cool things? Like, I don't know, augmented reality processing or something to do with connected cars that has to run at the edge of the network. And those things could be cloud-native and coexist on the same platforms. Now we start to get into whole new realms of innovation."