AT&T to use open source SDN technology to prove 5G

As the next generation of mobile communication technology, the research and development of 5G technology is in full swing. However, 5G's faster speed and lower latency also bring some problems. The same Internet access lacks applications to better demonstrate its functions. For example, Chattanooga Municipal Power Company EPB reduced the price of Gig-internet to $69.95 per month because many customers chose the slower 100MB service at $59.95 because typical mobile and PC applications did not demonstrate the advantages of high speed.

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It’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Without high-speed infrastructure, you can’t build applications that showcase 5G’s capabilities. And without applications, the infrastructure won’t be cost-effective and deployable at scale.

Last week, AT&T, the Linux Foundation, IBM, Intel, Ericsson and others announced an open source partnership to advance key components of the SDN stack, including control, orchestration, management and policy, so that it can run on mass-produced commercial telecom hardware in the future.

The move is best understood in the context of the open-source data center hardware consortium, the Facebook-started Open Compute Project (OCP), which includes nearly every major data center equipment maker and data center owner, including Facebook rival Google.

Facebook and Google chose to contract with large hardware manufacturers such as Dell, HP and IBM to build the systems in their data centers. They wanted more flexibility and lower costs. These companies moved very quickly to develop their own hardware platforms. These platforms are based on open source software and optimize the flexibility of their data center platforms to meet changing workloads by focusing their influence at the component level and removing the dependence on system manufacturers' product cycles.

Intel, for example, builds motherboards that use field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), enabling previously hardwired low-level code to be updated as a software project that adds functionality, increases processing speeds and reduces latency, eliminating the need for forklift upgrades.