The ONOS project’s CORD initiative includes carrier interest from AT&T, Verizon and SK Telecom
The Open Network Lab’s Open Network Operating System project this week touted continued progress on its central office re-architected as data center initiative, including ongoing work towards the development of a new open reference implementation.
ONOS noted the CORD initiative is designed to “provide economies of scale and agility of cloud computing to the telco central office by leveraging infrastructure constructed from commodity building blocks” using software-defined networking, network functions virtualization and cloud technologies. At this week’s Open Network Summit, ONOS said it would showcase various CORD use cases, including Mobile Cord, which is said to integrate disaggregated and virtualized radio access network, evolved packet core and mobile edge computing to target “5G” technology moves.
The organization said a number of service providers and vendors are currently looking into the platform for experimentation, trials and eventually production deployments. Those include AT&T, China Unicom, Equinix, NTT Communications, SK Telecom, Verizon Communications, Ciena, Cisco, Fujitsu, Huawei, NEC and Nokia.
“CORD is in a very unique and advantageous position,” said Guru Parulkar, executive director at ON.Lab, in a statement. “It has matured at record speed from a use case of ONOS to a very important systems platform that service providers can use for multiple domains of use. The list of companies now participating, contributing, using and interested in CORD is already very long and impressive.”
Parulkar recently joined RCR Wireless News’ “Carrier Wrap” show to provide an update on the organization.
The ONOS project recently celebrated its 1-year anniversary by welcoming Verizon into its fold. The addition bolstered the project’s carrier list to include the two largest telecom operators in the U.S., with AT&T welcoming support from its rival.
“We’re pleased to welcome Verizon to the ONOS community and look forward to many positive contributions from them and others,” said John Donovan, senior EVP for AT&T Technology and Operations. “We’re big believers in using open source platforms and software to build the next generation of cloud-based connectivity services and capabilities for our customers, and we’re glad to collaborate with Verizon in this vision.”
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