When an asset is built to last for a decade, operating expenditures far exceed capital investment. Building in flexibility via software-defined networking (SDN) enables carriers to dynamically reallocate bandwidth from a central location rather than rolling a truck to the site of the switch. That’s the theory, anyway. The reality depends upon the execution. Here, Glenn Wellbrock, director, backbone network design at Verizon, and Winston Way, chief systems architect at NeoPhotonics, discuss how to make it work. Got headaches with network restoration, network maintenance, network defrag, or floating spares? Learn more about the contentions around contentionless, how Verizon is saving money using multicast switches, and why the best contentionless software solutions have a little bit of hardware at their core.