Open Source Networks in Action: How leading telcos are harnessing the power of LF Networking

This post originally appeared in LF Networking’s blog. 

Now in its fifth year as an umbrella organization, LF Networking (LFN) and its projects enable organizations across the globe to more quickly and effectively achieve digital transformation via the community’s shared development efforts. This includes companies of all sizes and types that rely on LFN’s breadth of commercially-ready ecosystem offerings, all based on open source innovation spearheaded within the LF Networking community.

As mature LFN projects, ONAP (Open Network Automation Platform) and OpenDaylight are currently deployed as critical components in networks around the globe. Below is a sampling of specific case studies currently implemented in the real-world that are allowing organizations to transform their networks. 

Spark automates disaggregated network in just 6 months using ONAP. As Spark New Zealand Limited (Spark) approached 5G deployment, they started analyzing the status of automation across network and infrastructure and realized they needed an automation suite that would support future use cases that 5G could enable, such as network slicing, and closed loop automation.  In partnership with Infosys, Spark took a relatively short six months to go from kickoff to implementation of ONAP. More details are available here.
Verizon leverages OpenDaylight as its directional SDN controller. After initial work exploring OpenDaylight (ODL), Verizon decided to pull the testing, packaging, support in-house and create their own optimized ODL distribution. ODL now serves as Verizon’s foundational and directional SDN controller with two use cases in production across the network. Verizon brings a strong developer team to the project with several employees directly participating in ODL on eleven projects. Currently, Verizon is using Yang model driven platform solutions and wants to integrate different types of data modeling technology, Open APIs, rest platforms, and more. More details are available here.
Deutsche Telekom deploys ONAP in O-RAN Town. In its O-RAN Town project, DT deployed in the city of Neubrandenburg a multi-vendor Open RAN trial network for 4G and 5G services with massive MIMO integrated into the live network — the first in Europe. To automate services on all network domains, DT introduced a vendor-independent Service Management and Orchestration (SMO) component based on ONAP open source. The SMO is to be at the heart of complete lifecycle management of all O-RAN components in this deployment. More details are available here.
 Orange deploys automation framework powered by ONAP. Realizing a long-pursued goal of using ONAP, Orange has deployed and trialed an automation framework powered by ONAP. The current use case, in production in Orange Egypt, includes automating network services, network connectivity and resource management inside IP/MPLS, and configuration changes such as provisioning virtual private networks. Through this initiative, Orange has demonstrated that ONAP has reached the maturity and modularity for network operators to take combinations of ONAP projects and components from proof of concept to production. More details are available here.
Bell automates a significant amount of manual configuration, recovery, and provision work by using ONAP in production across multiple use cases. Since 2017, the use of ONAP at Bell Canada has expanded to automating numerous key network services across all business units. Moving forward, ONAP is playing a major role in 5G and multi-access edge computing (MEC) rollouts. The key metric Bell uses to measure the success of ONAP is the number of recurring manual task hours saved per month. Each project that adopts ONAP for a specific service tracks this metric. In 2019 alone, Bell saved a significant amount of recurring manual work per month as a result of using ONAP. In 2020, the team will also measure the acceleration of new services on-boarded to the platform. Currently, the on-boarding process can range from a few weeks to six months. Learn more in this detailed case study.

These are just a few examples of what is possible with open networking. Stay tuned to LF Networking channels for more industry proof points across the ecosystem and follow the LFN community journey (visit our website and follow us on Twitter)  to witness the power of open collaboration on the future of networking.