Open Network Featured Article

Recently, Bell Canada undertook a new move to augment its open networking options, thanks to a little help from AT&T (News - Alert). The new measure called for Bell Canada to bring in AT&T's Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management and Policy (ECOMP) platform, an open source operation, to build new capabilities in software-defined networking (SDN) operations. This should prove a wise move not only for Bell Canada (News - Alert), who gets to put the system to use, but also for AT&T, who gets to prove its ultimate value under field conditions.

With ECOMP in place, Bell Canada can push open networking forward by both building and operating SDN systems, which should help give it some more efficient operations that it can pass on to customers. AT&T, meanwhile, put ECOMP together as a means to deliver such service capability to other developers and service providers in the field, and at last report, plans to release the platform on an open-source basis starting in the first quarter of 2017.

Bell isn't the first company to help AT&T out on this front; previously, European telecom firm Orange (News - Alert) was spotted working with AT&T here, as AT&T first began pushing toward a vision where software was the primary focus in a bid to augment network capability. The subsequent moves have proven welcome for AT&T as well as those helping out here; demands on the network have only gone up since AT&T first started, and with 5G access still some ways out, finding means to address soaring demand without big infrastructure spending was likely a priority.

It's clear that something has to be done about bandwidth issues. We as a society can ill afford to just sit back and wait the roughly three years—assuming nothing goes wrong between here and there—for 5G commercial rollouts to start. With new technologies emerging with a startling rapidity, and the culture changing to demand more bandwidth for everything from gaming—have you seen updates on Xbox One games now? They're multi-gigabyte range!—to mobile workforce tools,  the plain and simple is we need more bandwidth. Improving things at the software level with tools like ECOMP and open networking options may mean the difference between reasonable accommodation and a lot of congestion a year or two before 5G's arrival.

While this may not work as well as AT&T likely hopes, it's still a step in the right direction. Even if it only buys us some time, it will help get us over the hump to the expanded capability 5G represents.