AT&T Wants White Box Routers with an Open Operating System

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AT&T says it’s not enough to deploy white box hardware and to orchestrate its networks with the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) software. “Each individual machine also needs its own operating system,” writes Chris Rice, senior vice president of AT&T Labs, Domain 2.0 Architecture, in a blog post. To that end, AT&T announced its newest effort — the Open Architecture for a Disaggregated Network Operating System (dNOS).

“If we want to take full advantage of the benefits of white box routers and other hardware, we need an equally open and flexible operating system for those machines,” writes Rice.

DNOS appears to be in the visionary phase. “Our goal is to start an industry discussion on technical feasibility … and determine suitable vehicles (standards bodies, open source efforts, consortia, etc.) for common specification and architectural realization,” according to an AT&T white paper, introducing dNOS.

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