Transforming telecommunications through open source software

The telecommunications industry's major network operators and vendors have not traditionally engaged with open source. Now, under pressure to transform their networks to support mobile devices and the demand for video, this is changing. William Snow tells the story of how Open Networking Laboratory has transformed the industry through open source and where the industry is headed using open source.

The telecommunications industry’s major network operators and vendors have not traditionally engaged with open source. Now, under pressure to transform their networks to support mobile devices and the demand for video and with a desire to deploy services in days or weeks, not in years, this is changing. William Snow tells the story of how Open Networking Laboratory has transformed the industry through open source. Networking was the bottleneck. Servers had virtualized; storage had virtualized—but not networking. Stanford and Berkeley solved part of the problem with the concept of software-defined networking (SDN). Out of their work came a way to change the architecture of the network—and an opportunity to leverage open source to do it. The nonprofit Open Networking Laboratory was founded to build tools and platforms (and the communities around them) to help operators build better networks and get the most out of the SDN revolution. This work is now supported by 6 of the world’s largest network operators and 10 vendors. The first platform to come out of the Open Networking Laboratory was ONOS (the open network operating system), which provides the infrastructure to easily program a network in a DevOps model (open-sourced in December 2014). The second was CORD, (the central office rearchitected as a data center), which was initially built as a use case in ONOS but grew so rapidly it recently became its own open source project. Both are Linux Foundation collaborative projects, and in less than two years, the two projects have added 16 partners, 75+ collaborating organizations, and a community of over 500 people. Join Bill to learn where the industry is headed next.