The ONF adapts after sale of spin-off Ananki to Intel

Intel’s acquisition of Ananki, a private 5G networking company set up within the ONF last year, has meant the open-model organisation has lost the bulk of its engineering staff.

Timon Sloane

The ONF, a decade-old non-profit consortium led by the telecom operators, has developed some notable networking projects over the years such as CORD, OpenFlow, one of the first software-defined networking (SDN) standards, and Aether, the 5G edge platform.

Its joint work with the operators has led to virtualised and SDN building blocks that, when combined, can address comprehensive networking tasks such as 5G, wireline broadband and private wireless networks.

The ONF’s approach has differed from other open-source organisations. Its members pay for an in-house engineering team to co-develop networking blocks based on disaggregation, SDN and cloud.

The ONF and its members have built a comprehensive portfolio of networking functions which last year led to the organisation spinning out a start-up, Ananki, to commercialise a complete private end-to-end wireless network.

Now Intel has acquired Ananki, taking with it 44 of the ONF’s 55 staff.

“Intel acquired Ananki, Intel did not acquire the ONF,” says Timon Sloane, the ONF’s newly appointed general manager. “The ONF is still whole.”

The ONF will now continue with a model akin to other open-source organisations.

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Telecoms' innovation problem and its wider cost

Imagine how useful 3D video calls would have been this last year.

The technologies needed - a light field display and digital compression techniques to send the resulting data across a network - do exist but practical holographic systems for communication remain years off.

Source: Accelerating Innovation in the Telecommunications Arena

But this is just the sort of application that telcos should be pursuing to benefit their businesses.

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Deutsche Telekom's Access 4.0 transforms the network edge

Deutsche Telekom has a working software platform for its Access 4.0 architecture that will start delivering passive optical network (PON) services to German customers later this year. The architecture will also serve as a blueprint for future edge services. 

Hans-Jörg Kolbe

Access 4.0 is a disaggregated design comprising open-source software and platforms that use merchant chips - ‘white-boxes’ - to deliver fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) and fibre-to-the-building (FTTB) services. 

“One year ago we had it all as prototypes plugged together to see if it works,” says Hans-Jörg Kolbe, chief engineer and head of SuperSquad Access 4.0. “Since the end of 2019, our target software platform – a first end-to-end system - is up and running.”  

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Infinera buying Coriant will bring welcome consolidation

Infinera is to purchase privately-held Coriant for $430 million. The deal will effectively double Infinera’s revenues, add 100 new customers and expand the systems vendor’s product portfolio.

Infinera's CEO, Tom FallonBut industry analysts, while welcoming the consolidation among optical systems suppliers, highlight the challenges Infinera faces making the Coriant acquisition a success.   

“The low price reflects that this isn't the best asset on the market,” says Sterling Perrin, principal analyst, optical networking and transport at Heavy Reading. “They are buying $1 of revenue for 50 cents; the price reflects the challenges.”   

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ONF’s operators seize control of their networking needs

• The eight ONF service providers will develop reference designs addressing the network edge.
• The service providers want to spur the deployment of open-source designs after becoming frustrated with the systems vendors failing to deliver what they need. 
• The reference designs will be up and running before year-end.
• New partners have committed to join since the consortium announced its strategic plan

The service providers leading the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) will publish open designs to address next-generation networking needs.

Timon SloaneThe ONF service providers - NTT Group, AT&T, Telefonica, Deutsche Telekom, Comcast, China Unicom, Turk Telekom and Google - are taking a hands-on approach to the design of their networks after becoming frustrated with what they perceive as foot-dragging by the systems vendors.

“All eight [operators] have come together to say in unison that they are going to work inside the ONF to craft explicit plans - blueprints - for the industry for how to deploy open-source-based solutions,” says Timon Sloane, vice president of marketing and ecosystem at the ONF. 

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Ciena picks ONAP’s policy code to enhance Blue Planet

Ciena is adding policy software from the Linux Foundation’s open-source Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) to its Blue Planet network management platform.

Operators want to use automation to help tackle the growing complexity and cost of operating their networks.

Kevin Wade“Policy plays a key role in this goal by enabling the creation and administration of rules that automatically modify the network’s behaviour,” says Kevin Wade, senior director of solutions, Ciena’s Blue Planet. 

Incorporating ONAP code to enhance Blue Planet’s policy engine also advances Ciena’s own vision of the adaptive network.    

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China Mobile plots 400 Gigabit trials in 2017

China Mobile is preparing to trial 400-gigabit transmission in the backbone of its optical network in 2017. The planned trials were detailed during a keynote talk given by Jiajin Gao, deputy general manager at China Mobile Technology, at the OIDA Executive Forum, an OSA event hosted at OFC, held in Los Angeles last week.

The world's largest operator will trial two 400-gigabit variants: polarisation-multiplexed, quadrature phase-shift keying (PM-QPSK) and 16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (PM-16QAM).    

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