Embracing Openness to Power Future Network Services

By Arash Ashouriha, SVP Technology Architecture & Innovation, Deutsche Telekom

This post first published on Telekom.com

The exponential Internet traffic growth is still one of the main challenges for the Telco industry. In the past, Moore’s Law has helped us to keep our production cost for the exponentially growing traffic under control. With Moore’s Law flattening out, we see a strong trend in the industry towards the disaggregation of hardware and software. From monolithic black-box solutions, we are moving towards a modular, best-in-class, flexible and open ecosystem, including an automated lifecycle management in true DevOps style. None of the Telcos can do this on their own – the success of this industry depends on collaboration.

Beside its engagement in the Telecom Infra Project (https://www.telecominfraproject.com), Deutsche Telekom has now joined the Linux Foundation as a Silver member, and The Linux Foundation Networking Fund (LFN) as a Platinum member to drive the development of open source software for the telecommunication market. Existing projects like ONAP, FD.io, Open Daylight as well as upcoming projects on Edge Computing and AI are important for our success.

After all, open source is about community. So, together with the worldwide open source community, we look forward to contributing to solve the greatest technology challenges around virtualization, as well as evaluating the potential to incorporate open source code into our networks. As founding member of O-RAN, we are already leading the drive to introduce more openness and flexibility into the radio access domain, and participating also in ONF for an enhanced network programmability within our infrastructure. Joining the LFN now complements Deutsche Telekom’s embrace of open source software as a key technology in our architectural vision for future networks.

The work in ONAP, together with our activities in ETSI-ZSM, will lead the industry towards a fully automated network and service management. One thing is very clear to me: Intelligent and automated networks will be the critical success factor to leverage the full benefits of 5G, for our customers, both consumers and verticals. And we believe in joining forces with partners in the industry to bring in innovation and accelerate the path to this shared future!

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