5G Mobile Networks. Larry Peterson

of the implementation (e.g., NFV is generally VM-based rather than microservice-based).

      Although equating NFV with a different implementation choice is perfectly valid, there is another interpretation of events that better captures the essence of the transformation currently underway. When Telcos began the NFV initiative, they imagined incorporating cloud technologies into their networks, creating a so-called Telco Cloud. What is actually happening instead, is that the Telco’s access technology is being subsumed into the cloud, running as yet another cloud-hosted workload. It would be more accurate to refer to the resulting system now emerging as the Cloud-based Telco. One reading of this book is as a roadmap to such an outcome.