AT&T continued to drive SDN and NFV development, noting an upcoming CORD trial and unveiling its ECOMP initiative
AT&T continues to lean on software in an attempt to drive efficiencies from its networks being burdened with ever-increasing demand from consumers.
At this week’s Open Networking Summit, John Donovan, chief strategy officer and group president for AT&T Technology and Operations, provided an update on the carrier’s process, which is set to see 75% of its network controlled using software-defined networking and network functions virtualization technology by 2020. Donovan reiterated the carrier’s previous comments that it had hit 5.7% control at the end of 2015, which was ahead of its forecast 5%, and was on its way to 30% control this year.
“As of today, 14 million wireless customers are on our fully virtualized mobile packet core, with millions more being migrated in 2016,” Donovan said. “These are examples of how virtualization touches every part of our network transformation.”
Further bolstering its plans for the year, Donovan said AT&T was set to begin a trial using the Open Network Operating System project’s central office re-architected as data center platform, with the carrier stating the CORD platform would be used to accelerate the roll out of its GigaPower broadband service. The Open Networking Lab, which is shepherding the CORD platform, earlier this week 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.
AT&T is also continuing to drive innovation across the NFV and SDN space, with Donovan touting the telecom company’s work on its enhanced control, orchestration, management and policy project, which AT&T said is designed to automate network services and infrastructure running in a cloud environment. Donovan said AT&T has been working on ECOMP for nearly two years, tackling the project due to a lack of guidance for NFV and SDN deployments in a wide area network environment. ECOMP is said to provide automation support for service delivery, service assurance, performance management, fault management and SDN tasks. The platform is also designed to work with OpenStack, though Donovan noted it was extensible to other cloud and compute environments.
“A system like ECOMP is very powerful as it allows us to build our next-generation cloud-based network in a vendor agnostic way, giving us great flexibility for deploying NFV/SDN in our network,” Donovan explained. “As a model-driven platform, this framework costs less than maintaining existing network systems. And it allows us to accelerate the implementation of new services quicker than ever before. ECOMP is one of the most challenging, complex and sophisticated software projects in AT&T’s history.”
AT&T released a white paper on ECOMP in a move to garner commentary and support for the initiative, and said it was “amenable to releasing ECOMP into open source,” following up on previous comments to support the open source community.
“Where we go from here, however, depends on the feedback we get from the cloud and developer communities,” Donovan added. “We believe that one of the most important tenets of the open source community is that you don’t just take code. You contribute it, as well. This collaborative spirit is a driving force in our transformation.”
Bored? Why not follow me on Twitter
