Orange has announced plans to test AT&T’sECOMP platform for creating and managing a software-defined network.
AT&T intended to make the platform accessible to other operators and cloud developers. AT&T has committed to releasing ECOMP as open source software in conjunction with the Linux Foundation.
“ECOMP is a stake in the ground. It’s a declaration that networks of the future will be software-centric, that they’ll be faster, more responsive to customer needs, and more efficient,” Chris Rice, SVP at AT&T said.
“Orange’s decision, as one of the leading international carriers in the world, is a great endorsement of that approach.”
This supplements AT&T and Orange’s recent announcement that they will collaborate on open source and standardization initiatives to accelerate the standardization of software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) technologies.
Orange is the first telecom company to join AT&T’s ECOMP effort. This helps to validate the software-centric vision AT&T adopted several years ago as a response to skyrocketing demand for network capacity.
“The analysis we conducted of ECOMP currently shows it to be highly agile and comprehensive, a testament to the commitment that AT&T has shown to address the key challenges that global service providers all face,” said Alain Maloberti, SVP at Orange Labs Network.
“We jointly believe that a platform like ECOMP needs a strong and dynamic open source community to drive industry adoption, and we will work with AT&T to create a community to develop a reference software platform for automated network orchestration and management. We plan to start experiments with ECOMP firstly in a lab environment, to be followed by a field trial as part of our On-Demand Networks program.”