AT&T Misses Network Virtualization Goal
Sdxcentral | January 03, 2020
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.