Verizon has been able to tap its virtualization efforts to rapidly alter network operations to deal with shifting traffic patterns caused by the current COVID-19 virus outbreak. While that virtualization path is now paying off, it has not been without some kinks.

Srini Kalapala, VP of technology and supplier strategy at Verizon, told Red Hat CEO Paul Cormier as part of this week’s Red Hat Summit 2020 Virtual Experience that the carrier’s multi-year virtualization work has allowed it to quickly adapt to new customer demands that include support for more people working from home.

“As these customers are working from home all the time, we had to increase the capacity on those applications,” Kalapala said. “If we hadn't done virtualization this would have been a multi-week, multi-month effort to bring in new capacity. Now, in a matter of a few hours, we're able to bring the capacity up and get everybody the kind of critical service they require. So certainly the ship that we are taking is helping.”

Others have noted a similar need to adjust to a new normal in terms of network capacity. Jonathan Davidson, SVP and GM of Cisco’s Mass-Scale Infrastructure Group, this week noted during an online panel discussion that “the internet is moving from huge to absolutely massive. It’s moving from being critical to being essential to economies, businesses and governments, and keeping us all connected. As a result of COVID-19, we’re getting a glimpse of what the future for the internet is today” with the majority of work and learning now occurring at home.

Kalapala linked that level of control to that of webscale companies that continue to be that just out-of-reach target telecommunication operators continue to pine over.

“What it allows us is … to scale the way webscale companies have been showcasing their technology,” Kalapala said. “It allows us to be as flexible as the technology allows us to so that we can deliver new services and new capabilities in a much quicker and customer-centric model.”

Kalapala noted that such fine-grained control over its 5G network will also allow for features such as network slicing that he said has the “potential for driving the fourth industrial revolution.”

“We certainly are pushing 5G but it's the way we are deploying 5G networks that is going to really give all of us the kind of flexibility to manage this.”

Despite that extensive level of control today, Kalapala noted that Verizon’s five-year journey toward its virtualized future has not been without issues. He said those “kinks” involved getting everyone used to the idea of separating hardware and software “and then you know making sure that they work independently.”

“It's definitely been a new area for us and our suppliers and we had to work through our own kinks to get to the point where now we are driving a lot of our network traffic through the virtualized infrastructure,” Kalapala said.

That sentiment was also echoed by Japan’s Rakuten Mobile, which recently launched a fully virtualized 4G LTE service that will migrate toward 5G in the coming months.

“The dream that we have is to tell many of the existing telecom operators, ‘look, take two years of the journey that we had, it was not simple, it was not easy to build our organization, it was not easy to build the right skill sets. Maybe you should not repeat the same mistakes,’” Rakuten Mobile CTO Tareq Amin recently told SDxCentral.

To move beyond those issues, Kalapala said that carriers needs the ecosystem to “lean toward webscale for 5G.” He explained that this means more consistent infrastructure across operations that are more easily managed and can “take away the friction within our entire environment.”

“We are not looking for anything different for telco from what webscale and others are getting from [Red Hat] or from the general open source community. We think we will need the same things,” Kalapala said. “But our requirements in terms of performance, reliability, and others are a lot higher than the others. This is where we look for a hardening of the product. And in driving the community to meet some of those needs.”

Rakuten Mobile’s Amin said that the operator is running “its entire infrastructure on only six commoditized hardware types.” just a handful of hardware architectures. As such, he tells all vendors that if their applications cannot run on one of those six hardware types that they “don’t have the right software architecture to be part of the journey in Rakuten Mobile.”

While the virtualization journey has found some success, it remains a journey. Kalapala said that operators and their vendor partners need to stay the course in order to reach a destination.

“If we can get everybody to that … operations model then I think we would be able to deliver the foundational capabilities faster, which means that we will then drive the rest of the ecosystem to get onto this and then do whatever innovation that they need to," he added.