AT&T Misses Network Virtualization Goal

AT&T failed to meet its long-held goal to virtualize at least 75% of its network functions before 2020. It now aims to hit that mark by year’s end. AT&T failed to meet its long-held goal to virtualize at least 75% of its network functions before 2020. It now aims to hit that mark by year’s end. The company has often proclaimed it would reach that goal, going back to at least 2017, but AT&T now admits that those goalposts have moved somewhat. The company closed 2019 at 65%, despite a slightly downshifted goal to virtualize 70% of network functions before 2020. “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,” Scott Mair, president of AT&T technology and operations, wrote in a blog post. CTO Andre Fuetsch’s comments at the Open Networking Summit in April 2019 proved to be remarkably prescient. “We left all the hard stuff for last,” he said at the time. This puts AT&T just slightly ahead of its closest competitor. Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg last month said Verizon had virtualized 60% of its network functions. AT&T did, however, announce another notable accomplishment in SDN. “Today, 100% of the data traffic that runs through the infrastructure connecting the elements of our core network together is backed by SDN,” Mair wrote. AT&T has certainly cleared some brush on its meandering path to 5G, but a lot of detailed work remains. The operator today announced that 5G+, the moniker for its millimeter-wave (mmWave) network, is now available in parts of 35 cities, and its low-band 5G network has reached 19 markets. 5G deployments will have to ramp up considerably during the next six months in order for AT&T to achieve its goal of providing a nationwide 5G network to consumers during the first half of 2020. Behind the scenes, AT&T has been preparing for the ascension of 5G since 2013 by virtualizing network functions, running the majority of its data through MPLS tunnels under SDN control, and accelerating its move to a hybrid cloud environment. The operator also activated its first 400-gigabit optical connection in November 2019 carrying live traffic between Dallas and Atlanta, and now says it will begin deploying the technology across its network in 2020 via software updates. AT&T has been laying the groundwork for 5G for several years, Mair explained. But it’s approach to 5G from a marketing and customer perspective is full of caveats and unnecessary complexity. AT&T was the first U.S. operator to deploy a standards-based mobile 5G network in December 2018, but that service was exclusively limited to business customers for almost a year. Consumers didn’t gain access to 5G on AT&T’s network until last month, making it the last of the nationwide carriers to provide 5G service to consumers. The company’s controversial decision to label advanced LTE services as “5G E” in some cities, while reserving “5G” for low-band 5G service and “5G+” for service running on mmWave spectrum has created confusion in the market. Its bifurcated approach to 5G with unclear delineations between business and consumer offerings has exacerbated that dynamic even further. The pace of 5G deployments on AT&T’s low-band spectrum has picked up during the last couple months, but company executives have also tempered performance expectations for that offering compared to its mmWave 5G network. During a talk at an investor conference in November, Igal Elbaz, AT&T’s SVP of wireless technology, warned that 5G riding on sub-6 GHz spectrum will only “see marginal differences.”