NFV and SDN provide solutions for African network operators with low coverage yet high capacity demands

Pressures that are being noted by telecom operators in Africa include the continual threat from Over the Top (OTT) service providers, as well as the pressure to reduce costs and significantly increase agility and speed by which services are created and deployed. SDxCentral.com, an industry-specific website, notes other trends affecting operators' businesses are the increased innovation in devices used to access networks, the many different apps and services used daily and the increasing computing and storage needs. As the underlying network that connects all of these things remains essentially unchanged, this increase in demand is stretching its limits. For this reason, investment in NFV and SDN has never been more important.

George Debbo, a South African SDN and NFV expert speaking at AfricaCom, says that "NFV and SDN offer specific benefits to African Operators that face challenges of low coverage, but high capacity demands; limited technical personnel skills base; and auxiliary infrastructure (such as grid power and environmental facilities) not being supportive of deploying sophisticated and intelligent telecommunication systems, especially in rural areas."

Operators in Africa have realised the importance of investing in SDN and NFV now. A Telecoms.com survey done in March 2015, found that 76% of African operators say NFV/SDN is the top, or one of the top, priorities for the next 12 months. The survey also found that 83% of African operators intend to roll out virtualised architecture or services, into the live network between now and 2017.

Paolo Campoli, Head of Middle East & Africa Global SP Sales and SP CTO for the EMEA Sales Region at Cisco - Lead sponsor of the SDN and Network Virtualisation programme at AfricaCom - also added his comments saying: "Cisco's NFV architecture will help African Service Providers to transform their networks to prepare for the digitisation in the IoT/IoE era. We have combined NFV with two complementary technology initiatives namely Open Source to help free an organisation's technical talent to innovate and SDN, which is enabling organisations to accelerate application deployment and delivery whilst dramatically reducing IT costs. SDN also enhances the benefits of data center virtualisation, increasing resource flexibility and utilisation and reduces infrastructure costs and overhead and enables network programmability and code development to bring applications and networks closer.

"The result is a modern infrastructure that can deliver new applications and services in minutes, rather than days or weeks required in the past delivering with a platform capable of handling the most demanding networking needs of today and tomorrow.

"Cisco is sponsoring the SDN Theatre at AfricaCom 2015 because in Africa, we're already seeing strong demand for SDN from industries with complex networks that need to quickly process large amounts of data and this includes Service Providers in particular. Cisco is committed, with its SDN strategy, to foster an entire ecosystem of young programmers, talents and partners in Africa that will develop applications that talk better to the network and networks that are friendlier to applications."

Other expert speakers will discuss the key issues around SDN and network optimisation in a full programme of conference and demos. Speakers from top companies such as Vodafone, Huawei, IBM, HP, Italtel as well as independent consultants, will join Cisco in hosting discussions on this high tech topic.

Topics will include: 'An overview of SDN and NFV: Where are we now?' by Paolo Campoli of Cisco; 'The roadmap to SDN and NFV: Insight into Vodafone's virtualisation strategy' hosted by Vodafone's Janine Rebelo; and Unified ICT Infrastructure Enabling SDN and NFV by Huawei Technologies' Jiang Xue.

Delegates will also have access to the unprecedented interactive SDN and Network Virtualisation Proof of Concept Zone on the show floor. This is a chance for leading African operators to touch, test and compare the latest SDN, NFV and virtualisation solutions in a full three-day programme of demonstrations and Q&A sessions. Listen to world-leading visionaries, including the likes of Cisco, NEC, Sandvine and ECI Telecom, as they present the largest showcase of NFV PoCs. It's the essential destination to help you identify the right solution for your network.

About SDN and NFV
In 2012, a group of European 1st Tier Operators felt the method of deploying networks that involved physically installing made-for-purpose boxes, had to change, because of the enormous pressures that were being applied to the industry. They announced a new industry initiative: NFV.

NFV involves decoupling the associated network function from its proprietary hardware, and running this function as software on a server. Thus network functions, which today are provided on made-for-purpose hardware, can now run as software over generic pieces of hardware, such as off-the-shelf layer 2 switches and routers.

SDN, which is a complementary technology to NFV, separates the control plane from the physical forwarding plane, thus allowing network control to become directly programmable and the underlying infrastructure to be abstracted for applications and network services.

As NFV and SDN's functionality is performed in software, it means it can be deployed in areas were the auxiliary infrastructure is available and maintained, and more importantly in areas were skilled personnel are available such as cities or major towns. Also the process required to dynamically ramp up capacity, is much simpler and quicker, thus allowing operators to easily respond to unpredictable demand.

Ultimately the costs associated with SDN and NFV will decrease thanks to the economies of scale associated with using off-the-shelf hardware (such as layer 2 routers and switches).

About AfricaCom 2015
Taking place at the Cape Town International Convention Centre (CTICC) from 17-19 November 2015, AfricaCom is now in its 18th year. AfricaCom is Africa's largest communications conference and exhibition attracting 10,000 delegates. The conference programme covers the most strategic issues affecting companies in Africa's digital market - services, efficiency, profitability, customer experience, partnerships, policy and more - and features several co-located events: VSAT Africa, TV Connect Africa, LTE Africa and Apps World Africa. To register: http://africa.comworldseries.com/register/