Vodafone to unveil latest milestone in ONAP capabilities

Interoperability between telecoms providers forms the very foundation of our industry. As we transform how we build and operate our services at a global scale, it is critical that the automation and orchestration we introduce in our own networks and services can extend beyond telecoms provider boundaries.

We have been a proud Platinum member of the Linux Foundation’s ONAP (Open Network Automation Platform) for the last year, helping to drive the standards that will underpin a global shared network architecture. As automation plays an ever-increasing role in world-wide, interconnected networks, it is clearly vital that the wider industry all works to the same processes and methods, to ensure products are developed as quickly and as cheaply as possible – and thereby benefit consumers and Enterprises faster.

Recently, we have been working with other ONAP members to demonstrate advanced ONAP orchestration capabilities for inter-operator multilayer virtual private network (VPN) services. Tomorrow, at the Open Network Summit Europe, I will unveil the work we have been pioneering with industry partners, such as China Mobile, on cross-domain, cross-layer VPN (CCVPN), orchestrating the respective operator underlay Optical Transport Networks (OTN) and overlay software-defined wide area networks (SD-WAN) and peer to each other for inter-operator VPN service delivery.

The capabilities we are developing with our partners and the contributions to the ONAP community will allow us to offer next-generation networks services to our customers at global scale with speed and agility.

The CCVPN use case shows the benefits of industry collaboration when it comes to solving real-world problems, and demonstrates that ONAP works with commercial OTN and SD-WAN solutions.

This is just one milestone on the way to developing a completely open, standards-driven architecture platform that is able to quickly and effectively automate new services on a global basis. There is still much more work to do, trialling and experimenting with new processes and ideas to help drive open standards as we transform service creation, deployment, orchestration and operations.