| | August 20158CIOReviewopinionin myast year, a blogger posted a newspaper flyer from 1991 of an electronics retailer advertising a camcorder, portable CD player, clock radio, calculator, answering machine and various other gadgets. The punchline, of course, is that smartphones and apps have replaced every one of those devices.It's a jarring reminder of how quickly the rise of software and the mobile Internet have invalidated many old business models and forced companies big and small to rethink how they operate. For AT&T, the challenge and the solution go hand in hand. From 2007 through 2014, wireless data traffic on AT&T's network grew 100,000 percent. That's not a typo. As we like to say, your smartphone has become the remote control for your life. There's no sign of this trend slowing down. Industry analysts have predicted global mobile data traffic will grow nearly tenfold between 2014 and 2019.Under that sort of strain, the traditional network model of just throwing more hardware at the problem simply isn't sustainable. Adding more and more complex, customized and expensive routers, switches and other gear isn't the answer. Network demand will outstrip network capacity before too much longer. So how do you build a telecom network that can grow with that software surge? With software, of course. Software defined networking and network function virtualization are putting us on a path to a network that expands and responds in almost real time to our customers' needs. Highly automated software running on commodity hardware makes it much easier to add capacity, spool up new services, respond to outages and security threats, and give our customers greater control of their network services. We plan to virtualize and control over 75 percent of our network using this software-centric approach by 2020. We're confident we can hit that target. We're using a model that's already been proven in the software world (sensing a theme here?).Traditionally, network service providers built our platforms with a hardware-centric, bottoms-up approach. Reliability was the key criteria, measured by the famous 5-9s. Hardware had to be bulletproof. In a pre-Internet world, it was slow and cumbersome, but it was the only option. But now think about the rise of all the Web companies. How does a startup­a search engine or a social network or a streaming video provider­scale fast enough to meet explosive customer growth while keeping costs in check? By skipping the custom hardware and putting their features in software running on inexpensive, off-the-shelf servers and other systems. Think apps versus gadgets. You can isolate and route around problems in software. You can add capacity by deploying virtual machines on standard servers. You can keep costs low by using open source software, APIs and other collaborative software tools whenever possible.That's the model we're now adapting for the Wide Area Network. We're becoming a software company. It won't be easy. But the benefits are clear. By decoupling hardware and software, you enable both sides to evolve faster. We don't have to wait years for a new generation of custom hardware to deliver new software features. We can deploy new software at Internet speed. Software Defined Networking to Create Networks That Expand and Respond In Real-TimeBy Andre Fuetsch, SVP, Architecture and Design, AT&TL
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