Telstra has revealed the existence of open telco experiment. Pursuing the same, it will combine elements from at least three open source software projects. The experiment is being driven out of the telco’s CTO office and is being billed as the creation of a “future open reference architecture”.
Multiple emerging open-source telecommunications software platforms (including ECOMP, CORD and ONAP) are coming together under this initiative. They will demonstrate and provide recommendations to business stakeholders on potential future of the open telco reference architectures.
Just to share, ECOMP is the orchestration platform that US carrier AT&T created as the “brain” for its own software-defined network. It was open sourced in early 2017 and is now managed by the Linux Foundation. ONAP or open network automation platform falls under the auspices of the foundation. It is the combination of ECOMP and another orchestration project known as OPEN-O. Whereas, CORD stands for central office re-architected as a data centre and is designed to let operators manage telecoms exchanges.
As per the media reports, all three projects can be categorised as being related to software-defined networking (SDN) or network function virtualisation (NFV). Telstra did not outline exactly what purpose it saw for the architecture it is creating but shares a glimpse into how SDN is evolving inside the organisation.
