AT&T’s Fuetsch to lead restructured Open Networking Foundation's board

Andre Fuetsch, president of AT&T LABS and CTO, has been named chair of the Open Networking Foundation's board following the restructuring of the group as an open source-centric organization.

Fuetsch AT&T
Andre Fuetsch

Naming Fuetsch to lead the board makes sense. AT&T was a founding partner and long-time supporter of ON.Lab, and is reinforcing its support for these efforts with the assumption of this new leadership role.

With the restructuring now wrapped up, ONF has completed the assumption of all ON.Lab operations, realigned all work as interrelated open source projects and combined the communities of the organizations.

In October 2016, the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) and Open Networking Lab (ON.Lab) agreed to merge under the ONF name.

RELATED: Open Networking Foundation, ON.Lab merge, set focus on accelerating SDN adoption

ONF said this strategy is already yielding results, with new operators joining the ONF and with industry analysts predicting broad impact of the ONF's projects, particularly CORD (Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter).

Heavy Reading forecasts that the majority of service providers will use CORD by 2020 in some way, and nearly 40% of all end-customers (residential, wireless and enterprise, collectively) will have service provided by COs or their equivalents using CORD by mid-2021.

“We expect CORD will enable service providers to more effectively compete with web-scale operators while speeding network automation and innovation,” said Roz Roseboro, senior analyst of data center infrastructure and MANO for Heavy Reading, in a release.

Already, service providers such as AT&T and CenturyLink have begun to test CORD in their networks.

AT&T began a field trial in 2016 that uses an open vOLT application that runs as part of the ON.Lab CORD platform. This effort includes a virtual OLT (vOLT), which is part of the disaggregation phase of AT&T's implementation of NFV.

CenturyLink, meanwhile, announced in March that it was applying CORD design to improve its traditional copper-based DSL services, an effort it says can reduce operational costs and enhance broadband service activation times.

The telco told FierceTelecom in an earlier interview that CORD will serve as a common architecture for any type of last-mile network, whether that’s copper-based DSL or fiber-based GPON.

But CORD and ONOS are just two of several projects that the ONF is developing.

The ONF has recently chartered a number of new projects, including:

Open Disaggregated Transport Network (ODTN): Leveraging the economics of whitebox disaggregated optical networking components and SDN control to build open source solutions for carrier backbone networks.

Open Information Model and Tooling (OIM&T): Building next generation standardized network control interfaces entirely as software defined standards. First defined in the UML modeling language, tools automatically generate Yang and Netconf code intended to update legacy SNMP management standards.

In order to support the merged ONF and ON.Lab communities, an optimized membership structure has been developed to serve the needs of ONF’s broad spectrum of members.

The organization is making tracks available for companies wishing to contribute engineering resources via open source contributions and for companies who benefit more from consumption of the ONF's work and in return support the mission financially. An additional tier recognizes companies now contributing both with engineering talent and financially, giving these companies access to an array of new benefits.