Remember the hype for NFV? Whatever happened with that?

Since our recent posts have been retracing the history, and recounting the lessons, of software-defined networking, it seems like a good time to do the same with the other sea-change in networking over the past decade: network functions virtualization, or NFV. Most people trace NFV back to the call-to-action [PDF] several …

[sreynolds]

Telcoms people are the last to innovate

I saw some shiny new telco cards and it was using through hold components. Nuff said.

[Timo]

also attempted for telecomms

Back at that time there were also pushes to integrate cellular controllers and modems for the network side into general purpose computing and fit into the NFV umbrella.

But the technology will almost always be at least one step ahead of the performance of general computing resources. That being said some of the older legacy technology has been incorporated into general servers and computer architectures, and it does reduce maintenance and support costs. But not at the leading edge.

[sschuchart]

Other things too

The other big problem is actually the commodity hardware. Part of the sales pitch was being able to turn on services as needed....which meant over-provisioning. The reality was that customers rarely turned on new services. That meant a lot of horsepower sitting unused in the field, raising operator costs with no real way to recoup.

On top of that, many of the more proprietary CPE are...actually not that expensive. Add on your excellent points about single-pane-of-glass management and cloudification.....well NFV is essentially dead.