A year after the June 2024 Xi'an meeting, the ETSI ISG NFV community returned to China. This time NFV#50th plenary meeting was kindly hosted by China Telecom, in their beautiful and modern campus of China Telecom Information Park, PuDong, Shanghai. The summer in Shanghai was not only hot but also very popular. In the same week, the MWC Shanghai 2025 exhibition was held, which is the largest annual event in the Chinese telecommunications industry. On this occasion, ETSI ISG NFV was honoured to invite Chinese Communications Standard Association (CCSA) officials, Chinese mainstream operators and vendors to hold a first joint Telco Cloud workshop between ETSI ISG NFV and CCSA, to discuss the future visions and key technical directions for the Telco Cloud in the AI‑native era. More information on this roundtable event is available at https://www.etsi.org/newsroom/blogs/entry/etsi-and-ccsa-joint-telco-cloud-workshop-in-parallel-with-nfv-50.

Figure 1: China Telecom campus hosting NFV#50 meeting

In the opening session of NFV#50, ISG chair Yoshihiro Nakajima announced the recent election result in the community: Mr. Jian Xu from China Mobile was first elected as TSC Vice‑Chair, and Mr. Kostas Katsalis was re‑elected as IFA Working Group Vice‑Chair. Congratulations to the above standard experts, and thanks for their sustained contribution to ETSI ISG NFV. The community welcomed China Mobile to join the leadership group. In the Chair's perspective presentation, Yoshihiro Nakajima also summarised the recent ETSI release of two NFV evolution whitepapers and called for analysis of AI in Telco Cloud scenarios in the future. After the opening session, an ISG NFV wide cross-working groups meeting was held for NFV Release 6 planning, in which IFA WG presented their latest progress on the new Telco Cloud architecture specification, elaborated key open issues and collected feedback from other WGs.

As usual, the closing plenary meeting continued discussions for future directions related to NFV evolution. Three presentation proposals were introduced in the session. "ETSI ISG NFV next step" presentation elaborated the scope of the new Telco Cloud architecture specification activities, and called for more feedback from related stakeholders, including operators, vendors, open source, academia, as well as application providers and hyper-scalers who were not deeply engaged in telecom standardisation. "Major use case focus" presentation proposed four categories of valuable use cases for the Telco Cloud, including computing-network convergence, data management, AI‑driven Telco Cloud and new infrastructure. By deep interaction between AI and NFV, which was also understood as "AI‑native NFV", the future AI-intensive or compute-intensive applications and network functions were expected to be well-controlled and managed during their lifecycle. "Combining several ISGs to a new TC in ETSI" presentation analysed the ETSI TC Network initiative and provided initial suggestions for organisational changes under ETSI.

During NFV#50 week, the usual technical work undertaken by respective WGs made progress. The highlights of the WG meetings' outcome included:

• Release 6 study on new infrastructure (ETSI GR NFV-EVE 023) achieved stable draft status and entered WG final review.
• IFA WG initiated cross-WG discussion on the Telco Cloud architecture specification and reached initial ISG-wide endorsement on the "function" representation inside an architectural block.
• Release edition 531 feature development was stable, a package of SOL specifications started WG review, accommodating the enhancements to the features of NFV for 5G, policy model, green NFV, generic OAM, PIM and API conformance test.
• Final drafts of ETSI GS NFV‑IFA 055 (Non-functional reliability requirements specification), ETSI GS NFV‑SEC 029 (Security Assurance Specification for VIM) and ETSI GS NFV‑SEC 030 (Security Assurance Specification for VNFM) were available for ISG approval.

A few new work items were also endorsed by the WGs and sent to ISG approval via remote consensus:

• Investigating GitOps in NFV.
• Super-WID for Release 5 TST010 edition 521, 531 and 541.

Immediately after NFV#50 plenary meeting, several inter-organisation joint workshops were planned for discussing and collecting feedback on Release 6 Telco Cloud architecture design, including ETSI TC EE, SDG Open Slice, SDG Open Source MANO and ITU‑T SG13. This July was destined to be a busy communication season.

Figure 2: ETSI NFV and CCSA TC3 joint workshop

Next time, the NFV community looks forward to the meet in September for NFV#51 meeting, which will be hosted by Huawei in Bonn, Germany.