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April 2019

Opening up for the automated future of multi-gigabit broadband

By Blog

Originally posted on the Nokia Blog

It’s always a proud moment when something you’ve nurtured for so long starts to bear fruit.

I’ve blogged before about why Nokia keeps pushing openness and taking a leading role in initiatives like OB-BAA and ONAP, and why we also champion standardization efforts in the BBF and ETSI NFV. It’s increasingly evident that open software architectures will renew the focus on true product differentiation and stimulate collaborative development between telecom vendors and service providers.

This week at the Open Networking Summit North America 2019 we will celebrate another milestone in the path to openness with the first demonstration of how fixed access broadband services (BBS) can be automated with ONAP’s 4th release, the Dublin release.

For those not so familiar with ONAP, it’s the latest shining example of what can be achieved with open networking cooperation. The ONAP community aims to create a global service and network orchestration and automation platform for all domains: 5G, enterprise and fixed access. This is a milestone in applying ONAP to the fixed access domain.

The goal here is to deliver operational excellence and the best customer experience in the design, provisioning and management of multi-gigabit broadband services. We’re demonstrating the extensibility of the ONAP platform in supporting the orchestration of fixed access services across different locations (Central Office and Core) and technology domains (Access and Edge).

Nokia has been particularly active in expanding ONAP’s ability to manage and orchestrate not only virtualized but also physical network functions. This is crucial as we know that operators’ fixed networks will be in a hybrid state, with software-defined elements existing alongside traditional network elements, for many years to come.

We’ve built openness into our software-defined access network (SDAN) solutions from the ground up. The model-based, policy-driven and vendor-agnostic automation found in Nokia Altiplano cloud native access platform can be complemented by ONAP or any other truly open networking solution, giving our customers the freedom to architect and adopt what’s right for their networks. The crux is to become more responsive to future service and network innovations and reduce the lengthy development and integration cycles needed to evolve traditional OSS management software architectures.

Looking ahead, we expect ONAP to play an important role in the industry alignment and feed back into traditional standards developing organizations for automation in fixed access. This is why the BBS use case relies heavily on using open standards such as the BBF CloudCO Architectural Framework and TMF’s Open APIs. 

Join us at Open Networking Summit North America 2019 to see the demonstration on the Linux Foundation Networking booth and hear from Nokia’s Tim Carey and others about how we’re planning to continue this journey with ONAP. The event is an excellent opportunity to witness the latest developments in cloud-native networking and next-gen SDN, so I really hope you can come along.

Share your thoughts on this topic by joining the Twitter discussion with @nokianetworks or @nokia using #SDN #NFV #automation