Carriers to Prioritize Software-Defined Technologies

Many service providers this year leveraged software-defined networking to inject agility into their networks. By extension, software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) is allowing these carriers to offer in-demanded hybrid networking offerings to their business customers. 

Several carriers, including AT&T and EarthLink, introduced SD-WAN services for businesses looking to intelligently prioritize traffic across their networks. SD-WAN services will continue to be a popular solution for end customers in 2017, and carriers will be diving deeper into SDN and Network Functions virtualization (NFV) technologies in order to evolve their own legacy networks.