The evolution of telecom infrastructure
Over the past few decades, telecom infrastructure has been built primarily on proprietary appliance-based hardware. The network elements in 3G and 4G were built using monolithic software principles and were not designed for distributed functions. It was also not easy to scale these network elements in or out without adding or removing bulky and space/power-hogging custom appliances.
In many cases, the service provider themselves would request only a fraction of the capacity of the appliance for, say, adding a small percentage of users. It would still need to procure the hardware at an appropriate size for the original larger capacity, hence greatly increasing the Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) on building and expanding a mobile network.
Operators consistently have been under pressure to reduce data rates across the world; hence, it became imperative for them to reduce the operational expenditure and CAPEX.
To mitigate this problem, over...
