Verizon on Thursday became the latest service provider to join the open source SDN Network Operating System (ONOS) project.
The partnership will see Verizon collaborate with other service and solutions providers like AT&T, NTT Communications, SK Telecom, China Unicom, Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Ericsson, Huawei and Intel to accelerate the adoption of open source SDN and NFV solutions.
“Verizon recognizes the potential of ONOS as an open source SDN platform and the service provider solutions it enables, as well as the promise it holds to transform the networking industry,” Verizon’s vice president of Network Planning Brian Higgins said in a statement. “By joining the partnership, we hope to advance open source SDN and NFV solutions based on ONOS and to help shape the future of this ecosystem.”
The announcement coincided with the one-year anniversary of the ONOS community. Over the course of its first year, ONOS attracted five new partners – including three service providers and two vendors – to join its original eight participants.
ONOS said its software has registered 12,000 downloads, and more than 100 organizations use the software globally.
According to Thursday’s press release, ONOS is a carrier-grade SDN network operating system that provides “high availability, scalability, performance, and rich northbound and southbound abstractions.” Through its partnerships and industry feedback, ONOS said it hopes to “rapidly develop the apps and use cases carriers want.”
One of those use cases, SK Telecom CTO Alex Jinsung Choi said, is 5G.
“We are delighted to have Verizon as a member of the ONOS partnership,” Choi said. “We share a vision for building 5G mobile networks using open networking technologies. We look forward to collaborating with Verizon and other partners to accelerate adoption of 5G with open source SDN and NFV solutions using ONOS.”
Filed Under: Infrastructure