Dear ONF Community,
It has been an interesting and remarkable year, to say the least. As a community we have made immense progress in our mission, and we are grateful you have been a part of it. We want to take this opportunity to thank everyone in the ONF ecosystem, and a special thank you to all of our members for your continued support and collaboration.
ONF and its community have reached several notable milestones over the past year:
ENTERPRISE
ONF launched Aether, the first open source connected edge cloud platform for Private 5G/4G Edge-Cloud-as-a-Service. Aether provides mobile connectivity and edge cloud services for distributed enterprise networks, all provisioned and managed from a centralized cloud. ONF also announced that Aether will be used as the foundation for the $30M DARPA Pronto Project. Learn more here.
MOBILE
ONF launched the SD-RAN project, backed by major operators, to create an open source near-real-time RIC controller compatible with the O-RAN architecture.
OMEC, an open source mobile core, is now in production with T-Mobile Poland. OMEC is part of the COMAC RD which provides the underpinning for access agnostic (wireline plus wireless) networks that can smoothly support burgeoning 5G architectures as they continue to mature. All of this is leveraging SDN as pioneered by ONF.
Secure 5G: ONF is playing a significant role in PRONTO, a new secure 5G initiative backed by $30M of funding from DARPA and partnering with Cornell, Princeton and Stanford to do advanced research on network verification and closed loop control. As this advances, these capabilities are being fed back into ONF’s Aether platform.
BROADBAND
Operators are deploying SEBA. Adoption of the SEBA and VOLTHA open source projects and the SEBA Reference Design is generating significant improvement in operating costs and increasing margins on this hotly contested space that has become even more critical with the global move to work-from-home.
SD-BNG: Operators are starting to work within the ONF to define software APIs for disaggregating the BNG function.
SDN INFRASTRUCTURE
ONF is playing a significant role in PRONTO, a new secure 5G initiative backed by $30M of funding from DARPA and partnering with Cornell, Princeton and Stanford to do advanced research on network verification and closed loop control, and feed these new capabilities back into ONF’s Aether platform.
We’ve witnessed deployment of ONF’s Trellis (SDN leaf spine fabric, controlled by ONOS) at scale in production.
Our P4 ecosystem is growing stronger as P4 finds its way into commercial offerings and serves as the foundation for a next-generation of SDN infrastructure and a related body of very exciting work. P4 is also playing a significant role in the new DARPA-funded Pronto Project.
NEW ECOSYSTEM INITIATIVES
ONF also announced this year a new Continuous Certification Program, which is enabling supply chain vendors to embed their products for ongoing test and compliance certification with ONF's open source software projects. ONF has taken the next step in responding to member and market needs for reimagining certification testing in the cloud-native CI/CD era, delivering more timely and concise visibility into compatibility between products and continually evolving software projects. Learn more here.
The ONF Certified SDN Associate Exam underwent a community-led revamp and is now available as OCSA-2.0. The OCSA program provides a strong foundation of vendor-neutral knowledge and skills validation for professionals wishing to improve their careers and gain advancement in the world of SDN.
Lastly, we created a new series of exciting virtual events to help our community to continue to innovate even during these trying times. Recordings and presentations are available for viewing:
5G Connected Edge Cloud for Industry 4.0 Transformation
(Content currently exclusively available to ONF members)
Clearly, our progress would not be possible without your involvement. The impact we have had on the industry is substantive, and our goal is to continue to transform network infrastructure and carrier business models. COVID has made this work more important than ever, and we are looking forward to continuing this progress in 2021.
