Verizon becomes member of ONOS project, furthers SDN, NFV innovation

Verizon (NYSE: VZ) has become the latest major service provider to join ONOS (Open source SDN Network Operating System), an organization for service providers and networks and a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project.

By joining the ONOS project, Verizon will be able to collaborate with other service and solutions providers to help solve the challenges of developing scalable, highly-available SDN architectures.

ON.Lab and ONOS' community includes a growing group of global service providers, including AT&T (NYSE: T), China Unicom, NTT Communications, and SK Telecom.

"Verizon recognizes the potential of ONOS as an open-source SDN platform and the service provider solutions it enables, as well as the promise it holds to transform the networking industry," said Brian Higgins, vice president of network planning at Verizon, in a release.

For its own part, Verizon began its formal movement into SDN and NFV in 2015 when it announced its core group of SDN vendors in April 2015. The service provider has employed the help of five of its key vendor partners: Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU), Cisco, Ericsson (NASDAQ: ERIC), Juniper Networks and Nokia (NYSE:NOK).

Higgins told FierceTelecom in a previous interview that Verizon chose to partner with five of its long-term network vendor partners for its SDN migration, but added that it is working with more than 20 partners on SDN. Higgins added those other companies are "non-traditional" partners and will be announced at a later date.

At that time he could not reveal any specific wireline services, saying Verizon is working with its network partners to identify functions that can be moved into software-based architecture.

The service provider created a centralized team that's driving the SDN migration across both its wireline and wireless networks. 

One area of its wireline network where Verizon could potentially implement SDN and NFV in a wider scale is in deploying next-gen Ethernet and optical services. At the same time, the movement to software-based architectures could help as the service provider looks to turn down more of its legacy central offices. Verizon plans to shut down 10 COs.

For more:
- see the release

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