Page History

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In this traditional model the technology and product roadmap of the Communications Service Provider was the technology and product roadmap of their Network Equipment Provider .  The Network Equipment Provider controlled the architecture, interfaces, the hardware and software within the network appliance, and the product roadmap, making it difficult for the Communications Service Provider or others to innovate to reduce costs or create new services.  which were driven by jointly developed standards. The standards-led product development led to decentralised yet globally compatible service offerings, it enabled worldwide roaming and unprecedented level of compatibility over defined reference points and across many vendors. Development costs for the Network Equipment Providers were high ultimately resulting in an industry consolidation. Capital and operational costs were high for the Communications Service Provider, but these costs were predictable and could be recovered over time from a captive the subscriber population in a relatively uncompetitive market.

Move forward a short twenty years or so and the industry has transformed.  Mobile and Internet are booming worldwide.  Traffic has moved from circuit-switched voice to packet-switched data.  The network has far greater reach: hundreds of millions of people in mature and emerging economies worldwide now stay connected to the network to regularly access valued consumer services such as streaming and business services such as video conferencing.  Capacity is significantly increased and demand continues to grow as more devices connect to the network and services consume more bandwidth.  Markets are far more competitive and communications services are increasingly commoditised.  As consumers, we pay less and get more.  The network itself has become the foundation for the new global digital economy of the 21^st century.  Happy days.

Scratch the surface of the industry a little and we see the Communications Service Provider’s business model is business models and ways of cooperating around technology remain largely unchanged from twenty or even a hundred years ago.  Networks remain largely homogenous and the Communications Service Provider remains locked-in in the long term to the Network Equipment Provider’s product roadmap for proprietary offerings. 

With network function deployed as physical appliances, being preintegrated bundles of hardware and software, new services require changing the physical structure of the network and this takes as long as months or even years and incurs the cost of a field workforce.  With Network Function Virtualisation, there has been movement from appliances to separation of hardware and software which has reduced time to deploy new services, however the Communications Service Provider remains locked-in in the long term to the Network Equipment Provider’s product roadmap.

The industry challenge is that the traditional networks that are the foundation of the Communications Service Provider business can in fact be slowing the business.  With consumers paying less to get more each year, the Communications Service Provider must continuously create new services and provide more bandwidth at a lower cost each year just to remain viable as a business.  The underlying proprietary network technologies and closed supplier ecosystems prevent the Communications Service Provider from leveraging the open market to introduce new capabilities to reduce costs or innovate to create a new service. This creates the challenge for the CSP's business model and the CSP risks being wedged.  The tipping point has already been reached in highly competitive markets such as India where CSPs are disappearing from the market or are merging but still losing customers to competition and from the once flourishing NEP ecosystem less than a handful of vendors remain today.  Despite the network itself becoming the foundation for the new global digital economy of the 21^st century, the industry that provides the network is facing significant challenges.

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LFN helps by increasing the availability ad and adoption of quality open source to reduce the cost of building and managing networks, giving Commuications Communications Service Provider, Cloud Providers, Enterprises and others the means to:

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The value of open source is not missed on the Network Equipment Providers, many of who use Linux as the Operating System for their network equipment.  Increased adoption of open source in other areas of their products will help Network Equipment Providers improve quaity quality and output while reducing development and maintenance costs.  

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