AT&T is moving quickly to transform itself into a software company, said John Donovan, Chief Strategy Officer, in a keynote at the sixth annual Open Networking Summit in Santa Clara, California. Last year, AT&T hit its target of virtualizing 5% of its network functions. This year, the company aims to increase its NFV rollout to 30% of network fuctions. This includes some 39 VNFs going into the production infrastructure. As of today, 14 million wireless customers are on AT&T’s fully virtualized mobile packet core
Some additional highlights:
- AT&T next big thing is ECOMP – Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management & Policy) Architecture. Donovan describes ECOMP as the most sophisticated software project that AT&T has ever undertaken — the engine that powers its software-centric network. The goal is to enable high utilization of network resources by combining dynamic, policy-enforced functions forcomponent and workload shaping, placement, execution, and administration. Over the past 18 months, a team of 300 AT&T developers has assembled 8 million lines of codes. It is designed to interoperate with Open Stack. AT&T has just published a whitepaper (link below) on ECOMP and is inviting industry commentary. If there enough community interest, AT&T is considering making ECOMP open source.
- AT&T continues to make progress on Central Office Re-architected as Data Center (CORD), which was first showcased at ONS last year. The idea behind CORD is to use SDN and NFV to transform carrier functions into workloads that are hosted on common, commodity infrastructure. AT&T trials for CORD begin this month.
- AT&T has doubled its usage of open source software in the past year. The company is participating in many open source initiatives and has just joined the Open Compute Project.
- Donovan sees virtual reality as being a huge driver of bandwidth
- Regarding competition and/or cooperation with other big cloud providers, Donovan said AT&T is comfortable with its role as owner/operator of its infrastructure.
- AT&T is now serving 26 million IoT devices.
- 60% of AT&T total network traffic is video
- AT&T is carrying more than 114 petabytes on its network daily.
