As operators strive to sweat assets “like never before” those systems are in place and proliferating all the way from customers’ premises to the core
TelecomTV has just published what it calls a “snapshot of progress made in some of the key areas of open telco infrastructure system and network architecture developments”.
This third DSP Leaders Report notes that while advances are taking time, now there are reference deployments of disaggregated, multivendor systems from the core backbones of major Tier 1 operators all the way to the customer premises – and provides concrete examples.
What’s the appeal?
The appeal of this approach is operators’ need to sweat their assets “like never before” to wring every penny from investment and new systems bring their own integration and other challenges.
As operators grapple with cloud-orientated networking architectures, “best of breed virtualised networking functions running on multi-purpose, white box hardware platforms is starting to tick multiple boxes,” the report states.
Telefónica blazes the trail
Evidence to show deployments are happening is drawn from an interview with Juan Carlos Garcia, SVP of Technology Innovation and Ecosystem at Telefónica. He is also a board director at the Telecom Infra Project (TIP). Garcia is quoted saying, ““We were believing in open solutions and now we are starting to seeing facts… it’s a reality and we have started seeing this in many domains.
“For instance, in the transport domain it was a dream some years ago to think we could disaggregate the hardware from the software… [Now] this is a reality in the disaggregated cell site gateway [DCSG],” stated Garcia, who noted that there are already tens of thousands of DCSG units deployed by multiple operators around the world.”
World first?
Indeed, Telefónica has deployed DCSG units in multiple markets in Europe and Latin America, and now is pushing a “world first” in Germany – keeping its white box hardware from Edgecore Networks at more than 1,000 locations but “switching in software from a new vendor, over the air, without visiting the site… I believe this is the first time that router software has been replaced,” Cayetano Carbajo from the Group CTIO office is quoted saying.
Telefónica supports a disaggregated approach all the way from Open RAN towards a more cloudified architecture, with Carbajo highlighting Telefónica’s progress with open, multivendor platforms for its fixed access network and has been testing, and will soon be deploying, disaggregated optical line terminals (OLTs).
MTN expands DCSG
Pan-African operator MTN has long regarded open network technology as an essential component of its infrastructure strategy and ran DCSG trials in Uganda and Cameroon. The latter showed MTN that it could meet its business objectives using open telco infrastructure Systems.
It recently issued and completed a request for proposal (RFP) process for DCSG technology and is in the final stages of concluding deals with the selected vendors.
AT&T at the core
Meanwhile, AT&T is deploying disaggregated, white box-based platform core network routing. It was early adopter of virtualised network functions more than a decade ago.
The report states, “So here we have one of the largest and most influential Tier 1 operators in the world using multivendor open telco infrastructure systems that feature not only technology from alternative suppliers but are running disaggregated software from an incumbent ‘legacy’ vendor (Cisco’s IOS XR software) that has been coupled with third-party hardware. This is the theory put in practice!”
AT&T’s Yigal Elbaz, Network CTO at AT&T, noted, “This is about optimum scalability and cost”.
KDDI’s network peering points
In Japan, KDDI has deployed the DriveNets Network Cloud software stack running on hardware from Delta Electronics housing Broadcom’s Jericho2 silicon at some of its network peering points.
The systems are based on the Distributed Disaggregated Backbone Router (DDBR) technical requirements developed for TIP’s Open Optical Packet Transport (OOPT) project group, in which KDDI has been a very active participant and contributor.