Again, if we take another transformative look at what we mean by that network, again we're going to start at the left-hand side of this slide. At the top, we've got a little icon that shows you that these are the wireless connected devices and they're going to come in through some aggregation switch, and then possibly into Ethernet nodes or other access nodes. If you're at a home or a small business, you may be coming in through some digital subscriber line, and again into an aggregation point, and then into the core of the network and similarly you work your way down. Maybe you got a passive optical network if you're advanced enough that you've got fiber optics. So, it comes actually into the premises itself and not just being terminated at the car. What we want to understand here, is that these are all the ingress points. If you think about it from working again from that left to right as we flow through. Then inside that network, the next thing we're going to bump into are larger aggregation nodes, where all of this traffic is going to have to be consolidated together. So, I like to use the model of highways and a local street. So, you've got lots of local streets and maybe some call to sacks are out there that's at the far left-hand side of things, and then that traffic begins aggregating and deeper into that network into those highways. So, we've got on-ramp on the highway and that traffic may have to go some distance, or may even interconnect with other networks, other interstate points as it goes further. So, if you're thinking about a user who may be sitting in the central of a very large geographical nation, let's say you're sitting in the United States and here in St. Louis. If you've got traffic that needs to go to you're Skyping to someone in New York, you want that traffic to head in the direction of the east not the direction of the west. So, in that portion of that geography, you're going to have highways intersection points that head in both the east or the west direction. Similarly, if you're going to talk to someone in San Francisco, you want that traffic to be heading that other direction. So, while we show this transport network in the middle of the network is a loop here in the cloud, it's actually, you can think of it as a set of interconnected highways, if you will, that have very specific traffic controls and capabilities that allow the direction of that. So, simply when you think about it is not a simple connection from endpoint to endpoint, but rather aggregation of those pieces of information just like cars or trucks on the highway, that have to go long distances and go through a common infrastructure and it's this common infrastructure, that's under that stress for that protected 20 billion or 50 billion devices. We're talking about being connected and similarly is at under stress because of the through the network type of applications, that are in there. If we dropped down a little bit lower into this picture and understand what's happening then, there's also a physical transport aspect of this things, I mentioned fiber already. It's very reasonable that we think about the interconnects between these long distance points as having interconnectivity, there's going to be the physical infrastructure. We're not talking about transforming that, what were we going to be talking about is transporting the layers above it, but it's important to understand that layer does exist and it plays a critical role. Then similarly, as we go deeper into the core of the network, there is functionality that takes place, not just in the communications service provider network for things like the evolved packet core, that we talked about in the functionality that's in there, is again as you think about how that device is going to work is as communication service providers renumerated to get money out of that service being used and they may be doing things like counting packets or utilization. If you're an enterprise, you may have subscribed to a particular quality of service or a particular utilization level and you might have service level agreements that determine how much you're going to pay or how much renumeration you're going to get back if the service is not met. So, there elements inside that network to keep track of all of that and generate those types of reports inside that communication service provider network. In addition to providing useful content for things like the routing of the traffic and analytics that could be in there. If you're the communication service provider network, you also are very much interested in the operational aspects of your network, this collection of computers that are generated events information all the time about the traffic that's going through the health of their system and then you've got things where you've got to concern yourself with the service life management of those platforms, is how do I continue to ensure that these platforms are secure, upgrading the applications, the operating systems to meet the security requirements that are obviously in that network. The reason that we're looking at this transformation, let's step back for a second and think about what I was just talking, the network function virtualization it's a means to an end as we describe it. That means to the end is changing the way we build and operate these networks. The reason we're doing that, is we linearly try to grow our networks at the point that our traffic is increasing, we can't do that, it's unsustainable, because the traffic in the network is actually growing exponentially and the communication service providers simply can't exponentially invest in more infrastructure into the network, nor can they exponentially invest in the operations, the staff that's necessary in order to transform that network at that rate. So, they're going to do something to keep up with that traffic growth rate and still not have an exponential growth in what they charge their customers, because that's not a business model that's going to be sustainable for them. So, what Network Functions Virtualization allows us to do, is transform the way we build and operate those networks. So, that's what we're going to drill down into and hopefully this is starting to make a little bit of sense as we go through it. So, let's back out and say, I'm going to transform the network but I really don't want to make the investment to transform what's existing in my network. We've got new technologies that are coming along as I deploy this new technology, these are the prime targets for transforming the way that we build this network, because again, we're talking about a network that's been operational for decades, is that the first phone call happened over 140 years ago and we've been building this global network for over 140 years as some of the equipment in it and it's not 140 years old I don't think anybody is, but certainly some of the equipment some of the functionality that's in there, has legacy purpose and legacy utility and the ROI on a piece of equipment that's still operational in the network is still generating revenue is really a good thing to continue to maintain. But when we introduce new technology or introduce new functionality into the network and those are the prime targets, not exclusively only target, but those are the prime targets for this transformation, and one of them that's really current today in our discussion is the technology that we call 5G.
