ONAP Adds Verizon, Claims De Facto TitleONAP Adds Verizon, Claims De Facto Title

Verizon today joins the ONAP as a platinum member, giving that open source effort yet more credibility in its goal of creating a single telecom industry approach to network orchestration and automation. It is the eighth operator to join as a platinum member and the 16th overall.

With this addition, the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) now supports network operators serving almost 60% of the world's mobile subscribers. "This basically means we now have ONAP as the de facto standards that the operators have embraced globally," says Arpit Joshipura, general manager of networking and orchestration for the Linux Foundation , of which ONAP is a part.

Verizon is promising to be very active in pushing ONAP to be carrier-ready, with hopes of commercial deployments in about a year's time, says Srinivasa Kalapala, vice president of technology and supplier strategy at Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ).

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Verizon contributed code to ONAP's first software release, Amsterdam, prior to joining the organization. The software code it contributed was developed as part of Verizon's trial run of ONAP's modular architecture to determine whether it would meet the operator's needs, he tells Light Reading in an interview.

"One of the intents of joining ONAP is that we would be doing more and going deeper on the analytics side and the architecture itself," Kalapala says. "We looked at the Amsterdam code and I think by Beijing release [due in late May], we see the full modularity and interoperability. That would be when we start introducing something more, and that is when we would start trying to operationalize it."

By the time of the Casablanca release, due out in late 2018, he expects Verizon will have some ONAP modules up and running. And if the code matures as expected in terms of carrier-grade stability and performance, there could be commercial deployments a year from now.