| | August 20159CIOReviewLikewise, because the hardware is now commoditized, it can evolve at the pace of Moore's Law. We don't have to wait for custom silicon to be developed. We don't have to wait for standards bodies to come to agreement. We don't have to wait for massive capital investments to pay off before moving to next-gen capabilities. Network function virtualization, where physical appliances are transformed into virtual apps, makes it easier to move resources to different parts of the network. We can also push software updates to the cloud. No need to roll out physical trucks to central offices. Software defined networking gives us a way to automate what were traditionally manual functions. It speeds up the process of how we provision and connect these functions together. And when there's a problem with that software, we can detect the issue, isolate it, and spin it up somewhere else and continue to serve that demand without manual intervention.It also opens up the innovation process. Because our network services are now in software, the developer community outside the traditional vendors can now contribute. Lastly, it gives customers more control over their network services. They can add and adjust features in almost real-time from their own dashboards. This spares them calling in a work order to AT&T and waiting for us to deploy updates.We've already made impressive progress in four key areas related to our 2020 goal:· We launched Network on Demand, our first SDN-enabled network service, in 2014. This enables customers to increase or decrease their network bandwidth as needed in near-real time.· We're working to virtualize our mobile packet core. We're virtualizing network functions that run our mobile network onto a common platform infrastructure. Traditionally, each mobile network function ran on its own dedicated hardware. Now, we're moving to a common platform running on off-the-shelf hardware. Unique functions happen in software. · We're virtualizing our enterprise and consumer Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) architecture, including Voice over LTE (VoLTE), so it all runs on one network. We call it the Virtualized Universal Service Platform.· AT&T Integrated Cloud (AIC) nodes are the physical sites where we're running virtualized functions that are part of our next- generation network architecture. We have 29 nodes today that are targeted to migrate to AT&T's AIC vision. We plan to add at least 40 more this year. Out of 150 network functions that we want to virtualize and control with our target architecture, our plan is to transform 5 percent by the end of 2015. We've got 2,000 engineers dedicated to our 2020 goal. We're virtualizing our first network services this year, including Connected Car and MVNO. This is a critical pivot for surviving in the future. But it's also an opportunity to deliver products and services more quickly than we ever could before. The alternative is sticking with a network model that will someday soon be as antiquated as a pocket calculator or VHS camcorder.Network function virtualization, where physical appliances are transformed into virtual apps, makes it easier to move resources to different parts of the network"Andre Fuetsch
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