The cloud only works if its components are interoperable so the four biggest networking vendors have joined forces to try to make sure NFV finally does something.

Inevitably this takes the form of a good old MoU – specifically to create something called the NFV Interoperability Testing Initiative (NFV-ITI), which is designed to ‘address the challenges related to NFV deployment and cloud transformation within multi-vendor network environments.’

The initiative has buy-in from the likes of OPNFV and ETSI, so it’s fair to say this is is pretty industry-wide initiative and it would be surprising not to see most other stakeholders join the fun. Everyone, of course, had to contribute a canned quote so we hope you’re sitting comfortably. Here goes.

“Cisco is focused on driving solutions for an open network architecture, helping our service provider customers speed technology adoption and time to market,” said Charles Stucki of Cisco. “NFV-ITI will foster collaboration and open-ness by bringing top vendors together to explore new possibilities for interoperability, and determine the best technology strategies for our customers to achieve their business goals.”

“Through SDN, NFV, and cloud technologies, Ericsson enables more flexible and scalable networks that bring innovative services to customers faster than ever before,” said Martin Bäckström of Ericsson. “By driving industry alignments on interoperability testing in specific commercial deployments, NFV-ITI will accelerate industrialization of NFV and help to create an even stronger ecosystem that benefits operators, customers and vendors everywhere.”

“Cloud transformation has been the prevailing trend with carrier networks,” said Long Jiping of Huawei. “Huawei is dedicated to promoting cloud transformation and helping carriers to construct an efficient, agile, and cloud-based network, by providing fully cloudified products and solutions as well as an open and collaborative ecosystem. NFV-ITI is an important step towards cooperation between vendors and will address multi-vendor NFV interoperability challenges. We hope additional vendors in this field can join us to create this mutually beneficial industry.”

“Supporting the creation of the NFV-ITI is another step towards ensuring service providers can smoothly migrate to cloud networks within today’s multi-vendor environment,” said Ron Haberman of Nokia. “While the network model is changing with NFV, the need for true carrier-grade performance remains paramount. Ensuring the integration, automation and interoperability of robust, well-architected virtualization solutions is critical to the performance, scalability, resiliency and manageability our customers demand.”

As if those canned quotes weren’t generic enough Ericsson separately announced a partnership with the king of lawyer-sanitized executive commentary, Qualcomm, as well as SK Telecom, to have a look at 5G New Radio.

Amid the usual lofty sentiments about driving the industry forward and so on, the announcement managed to specify that the trials will focus on wide bandwidths at higher frequency bands to bring about the 10 zillion bits per second we’re told we won’t be able to live without in a few years’ time.

None of the canned quotes from that announcement were worth repeating but Qualcomm’s was comfortably the most vacuous and self-serving.