In The News

As AT&T continues to ramp up its network virtualization efforts, the service provider is seeing its vendor partners embracing the software-centric model.

Having spent decades developing hardware solutions for their telco customers, including AT&T, traditional vendors have to rethink their product lines with an eye towards software.

The Open NFV Testlab will use Enea’s commercial NFV Core platform and Cavium’s ARM-based ThunderX workload data centre server processors.

The operator’s Testlab will host the platform as it looks to validate NFV technologies such as virtual consumer premises equipment, broadband remote access server, evolved packet core and IP multimedia system.

Margaret Chiosi, vice president of Open Ecosystems in the US with Huawei, has been at the center of the telecom transformation since day one — as one of the authors of the original ESTI NFV ISG white paper, and as a strong proponent of open source at AT&T. Today, Chiosi is responsible for putting all that together at Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. , where she is focused on making sure standards and open source are working well together.

Presenters in this video include: Chris Rice, Senior VP of AT&T Labs;  Arpit Joshipura, General Manager for Network & Orchestration at The Linux Foundation; Madam Yang, Deputy General Manager of China Mobile Research Institute; Alla Goldner, Industry Alliances & Standardization at Amdocs; and Dave Reekie, SVP for Research and New Technology at Metaswitch.

In his many presentations on ECOMP, leading up to its introduction into open source and its merger with OPEN-O into the ONAP, AT&T’s Chris Rice often cited the need for virtual networks functions to be more like Lego blocks and less like snowflakes.

Rice, senior vice president of AT&T Labs , isn’t expecting VNF onboarding to be child’s play, but he is hoping for simple processes that can be automated and replicated. And he tells Telco Transformation in part two of this interview from the Open Networking Summit that’s a key challenge for ONAP . See AT&T’s Chris Rice Details ECOMP & OPEN-O Merger for Part 1 of this interview.

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.