Membership Exemplifies Türk Telekom’s Commitment to Developing Technologies that Advance SDN and Greater Network Agility
MENLO PARK, Calif., September 12, 2017 – The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) announced today that Türk Telekom, Turkey’s oldest telecommunications giant, has joined the organization as a full Partner Member. Partner membership demonstrates the highest tier of support and investment in the ONF and its mission and vision.
“ONF is regarded as a world-class leader in the telecoms sector with its ONOS and CORD projects and vast membership support,” said Türk Telekom CEO Paul Doany. “Becoming a member of such influential consortium will benefit our company and our country. As recently announced by our Transport, Maritime Affairs and Communication Minister Ahmet Arslan, Türk Telekom’s membership to the ONF will contribute greatly to our country’s goals of increasing and exporting domestic and national technology production. As an ONF partner, we will be able to build new technologies and new standards and introduce them quickly in Turkey and on a global scale.”
As a new operator partner, Türk Telekom will join the ONF’s Board of Directors while also participating in various committees to advance the ONOS and CORD projects. Türk Telekom joins AT&T, China Unicom, Comcast, Deutsche Telekom (DT), Google, NTT Group and Verizon as the leading operators guiding the ONF in its mission to drive innovation in operator networks while transforming business models across the industry. These eight operators provide steering, guidance and investment to lead the foundation.
“We are thrilled to welcome Turk Telekom as an ONF partner,” said Guru Parulkar, executive director of the ONF and Stanford Platform Lab. “We’ve been working together for some time and have been impressed with their progress adopting SDN and leveraging the ONOS controller. We are excited by their upcoming plans for CORD, and to work together to continue building new technologies that will transform their network but also learn from their extensive 176-year innovative track record."
The ONF continues to innovate by blending cloud, SDN and NFV technologies to build next-generation solutions for operators by leveraging network disaggregation, white box commoditized hardware and open source software. These solutions come packaged as pre-integrated distributions that are transforming the economics of building complex operator networks, driving both cost savings while enabling new innovative end-user services.
Solutions are available for modernizing the most significant segments of operator networks, including:
- fixed access,
- mobile and wireless access,
- mobile core,
- datacenter and
- packet-optical backbones.
ONF’s members and broad developer community are the driving force behind these solutions. The ONF uses a unique Open Innovation Pipeline model to drive innovation, making it easy for vendors to work with the ONF to identify operator use cases, introduce their unique contributions into solutions, and take those solutions into operator trials. This process enables vendors to identify new markets, leverage the work of the broader community to reduce R&D costs, and speed time to market by riding the wave of operator consumption of ONF solutions.
About ONF
The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) is an operator led consortium spearheading disruptive network transformation. Now the recognized leader for open source solutions for operators, the ONF first launched in 2011 as the standard bearer for Software Defined Networking (SDN). Led by its operator partners AT&T, China Unicom, Comcast, Deutsche Telekom, Google, NTT Group and Verizon, the ONF has now merged operations with ON.Lab to create a single organization driving vast transformation across the operator space. With operations now completely merged, the legal merger of ONF and ON.Lab is expected to be complete in late 2017. For further information visit https://opennetworking.org/.
About Türk Telekom Group
Türk Telekom, with 176 years of history, is the first integrated telecommunications operator in Turkey. In 2015, Türk Telekomünikasyon A.Ş. adopted a “customer-oriented” and integrated structure in order to respond to the rapidly changing communication and technology needs of customers in the most powerful and accurate way, while maintaining the legal entities of Avea İletişim Hizmetleri A.Ş. and TTNET A.Ş. intact and adhering to the rules and regulations to which they are subject. Having a wide service network and product range in the fields of individual and corporate services, Türk Telekom unified its mobile, internet, phone and TV products and services under the single “Türk Telekom” brand as of January 2016. Türk Telekom has 13.2 million fixed access lines, 9.1 million broadband and 18.8 million mobile subscribers as of June 30, 2017. Türk Telekom Group Companies provide services in all 81 cities of Turkey with 33,621 employees with the vision of introducing new technologies to Turkey and accelerating Turkey’s transformation into an information society.
