Over the next few years, AT&T is looking to install no less than 60,000 white box routers in its cellular towers. According to the official press release from the major mobile operator, the roll out of the white box routers signifies an expansion of the usual approach to providing wireless services. The company stated that it is no longer constrained by what proprietary silicon and feature road maps of traditional vendors can do. Because AT&T is writing open hardware specs for its white box routers, as well as their open source software, the carrier is in a unique position to facilitate quicker upgrades not only for the hardware, but also for the software.
AT&T also made a point to mention that its deployment of its white box routers will require minimum costs, and will not conflict in any way with its grander and more extensive 5G network roll outs. Right now, the second biggest national carrier in the United States has a distributed network that consists of over 5,000 central offices and over 60,000 cell towers.
Last year, AT&T had launched a software focused initiative to develop its Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP), which is basically an operating system designed to automate and manage virtual network functions. This year’s white box router deployment is building on its earlier ONAP effort. Before the end of this year, the wireless service provider is targeting to virtualize about two thirds of its core network functions. It might be on pace to get there -- it had ended the year 2017 with 55 percent of its core network functions already virtualized.
One of the main objectives of all that software and virtualization initiatives is to have off the shelf hardware running software from multiple suppliers replace the specialized, proprietary hardware that is tied to a certain supplier’s software. As mentioned earlier, the idea here is to allow for faster upgrading, while at the same time, keeping costs at the minimum.
Another aim of the white box router roll out is basically to help prepare for the coming of the 5G era. By integrating software and virtualization into the fabric of its mobile network, AT&T is essentially improving and modernizing its current network so that it will be ready for upgrading to 5G connection speeds.
As stated by AT&T, each of its white box routers will be running the carrier’s dNOS (Disaggregated Network Operating System), which it has been testing for about a year now. For good measure, the mobile operator is also planning to make its dNOS available to the open source community, by way of the Linux Foundation.
