SD-WAN: Linking Policy to Carrier Networks for Improved Customer Experience

MEF Annual Meeting – July 2019, Shawn Hakl, Senior Vice President Business Products, Verizon, highlights the importance of the industry’s new SD-WAN services standard published by MEF. Among other things, standardization will help link policy to carrier networks to deliver a greater customer experience.

“SD-WAN is really the control plane for which virtualized functions will be implemented. As we see more capabilities built into the intelligent network – the Software-Defined Network – at the core of carriers, SD-WAN will really be the way that you interface policy with the carrier network.” This will be expressed in ways like enabling users to select slices in a 5G network.

“The work that the MEF is doing around standardization of the SD-WAN spec just makes it easier for that integration to work across multiple types of underlying transport. And what that means to the end user is that it lets them get an overall experience from the network relative to their apps. So you can support a broader range of use cases with specialized needs coming across the network. You can build a better end-to-end application experience, meaning you’ll hit price points more effectively and, more importantly, your guaranteed service resiliency and service capability in an always-on connected world.”

To explore the latest on SD-WAN innovations and engage with industry-leading service and technology experts like Shawn Hakl, attend MEF19 (http://www.MEF19.com), held 18-22 November 2019 in Los Angeles, California.