April 2017

Coriant announced its support for the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) Project to help accelerate industry adoption of standards-based Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) capabilities that orchestrate and automate service delivery in cloud-centric, SDN-controlled networks.

Open networking has been on a roll lately as large operators warm up to the idea of reducing hardware to white box infrastructure while architecting all of the tricky stuff on increasingly intelligent software.

This rightly has large switch vendors like Cisco in a knot. On the one hand, the writing seems to be on the wall that open platforms are the way of the future, but the transition will be extremely detrimental to the bottom line if it happens too quickly.

The biggest news out of the recentOpen Networking Summit in Silicon Valley is that the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) Project, which unites AT&T’s open source ECOMP and the Open Orchestrator Project (OPEN-O), has made substantive progress toward becoming a dominant lifecycle service management platform for the telecom industry.

At this rate, it will not be long before China Mobile’s biggest problem is the shortage of customers not using 4G services.

Yet again, the Chinese mobile giant has reported a jaw-dropping number of new 4G customers in a single quarter — in this case, the first three months of 2017. About 33 million subscribers joined the operator’s 4G service over that period. That’s like converting the entire population of Peru to the higher-speed mobile technology.

Indian operator Reliance Jio has become a member of the Linux Foundation’s open source project, joining operators such as AT&T, Bell Canada and Orange that are working towards cloud operation.

Jio, owned by Reliance Industries, is building an LTE-only network in India that is leading to a significant restructuring by competitive operators. It has become a member of the Open Network Automation Platform (Onap), which is promoting virtualisation and open ecosystems.

Indian operator Reliance Jio has become a member of the Linux Foundation’s open source project, joining operators such as AT&T, Bell Canada and Orange that are working towards cloud operation. Jio, owned by Reliance Industries, is building an LTE-only network in India that is leading to a significant restructuring by competitive operators. It has become a member of the Open Network Automation Platform (Onap), which is promoting virtualisation and open ecosystems.

Perhaps more so than other major events, this one has become something of a measuring stick of the industry’s progress on a couple of key things — adoption of virtualization and cloud-native technologies, and embracing of open source approaches.

It has also become a place where new trends and challenges emerge and begin to be discussed and charted. Along those lines, my list of key takeaways involves some things from both categories — the new and uncharted and the charted progress of the familiar.

ONAP took a final curtain call at the Open Networking Summit Thursday morning when AT&T’s Chris Rice and Yang Zhiqiang, the deputy general manager of the China Mobile Research Institute, took to the stage for the conference’s final keynote.

It has been a busy week here in Santa Clara for the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) with the announcement of its governing board, a date set for its first release and new member announcements from companies including Ciena, Reliance Jio, Microsoft, Ciena, New H3C Technologies, Wind River and the Department of Energy (DoE). (See ONAP Announces Code Release, Officers, New Members and ONAP Takes Center Stage at ONS.)

AT&T says this week’s release of the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) code into open source is a call to action for SDN developers to take an active role in the software-centric evolution taking place in the telecom industry.

Chris Rice, ONAP chair and SVP of AT&T Labs, said in a blog post that ONAP puts network developers in a position to drive the development of new services and applications.