Orange Poland, virtualization and the Beijing Release

Orange Poland early adopter of ONAP

As it continues a “bricky-by-brick” approach to 5G, Orange Poland recently worked with EXFO to incorporate passive virtual probes into the Beijing Release of the Open Network Automation Platform; the goal is service assurance for virtualized network deployments.

According to EXFO, this is an industry-first integration of a passive probing virtual network function into the ONAP release and the two companies’ collaboration will “enable the ecosystem to roll out open infrastructures based on SDN/NFV with the capability to monitor and troubleshoot complex end-to-end issues,” according to EXFO, which added that “it will also define a reference design for virtualized service assurance over 4G/LTE [networks].”

“As we transform our network, we are partnering with innovative and disruptive vendors to support our move to open source technologies like ONAP to guarantee our software independence and openness,” said Eric Debeau, head of Orange’s Network Automation Platform team, in a statement.

Earlier this year, RCR Wireless News spoke with Krzysztof Kozlowski, managing director of Orange Labs International Poland about what he called a “brick by brick” approach to a virtualized network. He said the operator’s path to 5G is based on pragmatism, and highlighted that while the emphasis on 5G discussion largely relates to how the end user will benefit, there are major benefits to the operator in terms of lowering data transport costs and reducing network opex. “It’s a way to cope with increasing traffic and increasing cost of network infrastructure.” Network slicing and the “automation it brings will really limit the costs from the operator point view. The same for the IoT piece. For IoT now we built a dedicated network while with 5G it will be native.”

ONAP Beijing Release

Orange Poland got an early start on testing of software control, working with Amdocs to trial the Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management and Policy software developed by AT&T. That began in February 2017; since then the Linux Foundation worked with AT&T and Huawei, which developed the Open-O orchestration software platform, to combine the two into what’s called ONAP and make it available as open source software.

The Beijing Release of ONAP is focused on seven factor: usability, security, manageability, stability, scalability, performance and resilience. Primary companies working on the enhancement include China Mobile, ZTE, Huawei, Nokia, VMWare, Jio, Intel, Riasecom and Boco.

Beijing is the second release of ONAP and, according to Linux Foundation, “provides robust documentation and training for Virtual Network Functions (VNF) developers, service designers, and operations managers. Leading developers from solution providers, vendors and system integrators globally have laid the foundations of a robust commercial ecosystem.”

In a statement, Mazin Gilbert, ONAP Technical Steering Committe Chair and vice president of advanced technology, AT&T Labs, said, “The technical enhancements in this release focus on enhancing the stability and deployability of the platform. In addition, the community has focused on supporting users in their adoption journey with the delivery of several new Getting Started guides as well as online and in-person introductory training options. Together with the community, we are further establishing ONAP as the defacto standard for automation.”

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