ork technologies such as 4G LTE having embraced the use of IP as a foundational architectural element. The Third Generation Partnership Project (3 GPP) standards provided a blue print for integrating the existing telecom services and future IP service with an IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) and alternatives for IP services platforms have emerged from adjacent industries. Public compute, storage, content delivery clouds accessed via IP protocols have changed the trans- port usage patterns for both business and consumer users. Business applications leverage shared resources in the cloud rather than private, distributed data centers and consumers increasingly inter- act more with the content in the public clouds. Today, a new telecom network, deployed in a "green- field" fashion, will be exclusively designed, built, and operated in an all-IP manner end to end. 2.3 THE NETWORK CLOUD The declining significance of transport and emergence of an all-IP network platform with diverse IP services demand creates an opportunity, or in some cases an imperative, for telecommunications providers, to remain relevant by embracing a new framework for the delivery of services. The essen- tial elements of the new framework include refactoring hardware elements into software functions running on commodity cloud computing infrastructure; aligning access, core, and edge networks with the traffic patterns created by IP-based services; integrating the network and cloud technolo- gies on a software platform that enables rapid, highly automated, deployment and management of services, and software-defined control SO that both infrastructure and functions can be optimized Transforming a Modern Telecom Network-From All-IP to Network Cloud across change in service demand and infrastructure availability; and increasing competencies in software integration and a DevOps operations model. We call this the "Network Cloud." The benefits of a Network Cloud framework include lower unit cost of providing services, faster delivery and flexibility to suppor