AT&T claimed the white box trial was a telecom industry first and included partners Intel, Delta Electronics, Broadcom, SnapRoute, Edgecore and Barefoot.
In its ongoing quest for greater software control over its network operations, AT&T said its engineers recently completed the successful live field trial of a multisupplier open source white box switch carrying customer traffic.
The carrier said the trial, which it believes was the first in the telecommunications industry, involved using a uniform open network operating system across multiple merchant silicon chips to “build a piece of network equipment that met our stringent real-world data needs.” The test boxes were used to provide telemetry into AT&T’s enhanced control, orchestration, management and policy platform to monitor traffic between Washington, D.C, and San Francisco.
Partners in the trial included Delta Electronics, which offered up its AGC7648A switch that used Broadcom’s Qumran silicon chips and SnapRoute’s network operating system for use in one of the trial locations.
A second location used Edgecore’s Wedge 100BF systems powered by Barefoot’s 6.5 terabit per second Tofino silicon running the P4 open source programming language on the forward plane to handle standard switching, routing and in-band network telemetry functionality. SnapRoute also provided its FlexSwitch open network operating system as the control plane and unifying operating system at the location.
Intel was also part of the picture, with its processors running the SnapRoute operating system managing the Barefoot and Broadcom chips and interfaces on the boxes.
In addition to integrating the switches with its recently open-sourced ECOMP platform, AT&T said the switches also used its internally developed TORC packet network control software.
“We’re in the early stages of this process, but already we see huge potential for increasing the speed of innovation, lowering costs and, most importantly, staying ahead of the needs of our customers,” said Andre Fuetsch, president of AT&T Labs and CTO at AT&T, in a statement. “With this trial, we went from using traditional switches the size of multiple refrigerators to a chip that can literally fit in the palm of your hand. We think white box will be a big part of the future of the wide area network.”
AT&T recently joined The Linux Foundation as a “platinum” member, with Chris Rice, SVP at AT&T Labs, joining the open source-focused organization’s board of directors and was recently named chairman of its Open Network Automation Platform.
AT&T previously stated plans to have 55% of its network functionality converted to software-defined networking control by the end of this year, having hit 34% at the end of 2016, and with plans to hit 75% control by 2020.
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