AT&T Clarifies Perplexing, Ambiguous Network Virtualization Goal

AT&T says it virtualized another 6% of its network functions during the last year and has virtualized 71% of its network to date. That’s a change from what the company said last week. AT&T says it virtualized another 6% of its network functions during the last year and has virtualized 71% of its network to date. That’s a change from what the company said last week. AT&T’s ongoing network virtualization effort, specifically the amount of core network functions it has moved to SDN, has been tangled in ambiguity. Semantics, or phrasing that effectively gave the company an extra year to meet its self-imposed goal, seem to have been at least partially at play. Moreover, because AT&T views network virtualization as a competitive advantage, it’s fair to assume that disclosing its rate of progress could effectively reveal more than necessary. The operator clarified some numbers this week after it appeared as though, based on its own public comments, that no progress was made at all last year. In a blog post the company issued Jan. 3, it originally said virtualization had reached 65% of its network at the end of 2019. If that number sounds familiar it’s probably because that’s the same percentage AT&T said it reached at the end of 2018. The operator was at 63% in November 2018. Sometime after publishing its update last week, AT&T edited the blog post and removed the mention of 65% altogether. That statement, as originally written, read: “We aim to control 75% of our core network functions with software by the end of 2020 and, by reaching 65% at the end of 2019, we’re nearly there.” Now that line in the blog post reads: “We are on track to control 75% of our core network functions with software by the end of 2020, and we’re nearly there.” A company spokesperson said the edit was made for clarity. The continued mention of 65% and apparent, albeit temporary, lack of progress, was even more perplexing because at least twice in 2019, during keynotes at industry conferences, CTO Andre Fuetsch said the company was on track to get to 70% of network virtualization before the end of the year. The company now says it did that with an extra percent for good measure. AT&T’s network virtualization journey began in 2014, when John Donovan, who joined the company as CTO in 2008 and later became CEO of AT&T Communications, said the company would put 75% of its network under SDN control “by 2020.” Donovan left the company in October 2019. As 2019’s conclusion neared, “by 2020” became “in 2020” in some instances, including comments Igal Elbaz, SVP of wireless technology at AT&T, gave at an investor conference in November 2019. AT&T maintains that it did not miss its goal and the company always intended to reach 75% of network virtualization by the end of 2020, but it didn’t always state it in those terms. By, in, and “by the end of” are not interchangeable. If the goal was to reach 75% of network virtualization by the end of 2020, it could and probably should have been plainly stated as such from the get go and consistently. Now it is. CFO John Stephens yesterday shared some more details and, in doing so, brought some clarity to these discrepancies in a blog post and interview at an investor conference. “The company has already virtualized 71% of its network functions and expects to meet its goal of 75% by the end of 2020,” he wrote. Why exactly AT&T said it was at 65% and then 71% six days later is unclear. Stephens did not share those numbers in comments at the investor conference, but he did say the company has been achieving a savings on network operations costs of about 6% during each of the last five years. “We’re getting that from software-defined networking and network function virtualization,” he said, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript. “We believe we can step that up about 4%, and we would expect to get that done in various ways this year.” In other words, if AT&T meets its goal of 75% by the end of this year, it could generate a savings of 10% on network operation costs. “We’ve done the software-based and virtualization base of the network,” he said. Now the goal is to expand the effort to other areas of the business, including customer care and sales, Stephens explained. In a keynote at the Open Networking Summit in April 2019, Fuetsch said: “We left all the hard stuff for last.”