KDDI, KT, SK Telecom, Sprint, Swisscom, and Telecom Italia join LFN to automate and transform the network, enabled by ONAP, OPNFV, ODL and FD.io

San Francisco — May 30, 2018 — The LF Networking Fund (LFN), which facilitates collaboration and operational excellence across open networking projects, today announced membership growth among leading telecom service providers. with the addition of Sprint as the newest Silver member.  An uptick in membership among global service providers since LFN’s formation earlier this year, which also includes KT, KDDI, SK Telecom, Swisscom, and Telecom Italia, signals strong and continued support from many of the world’s top carriers.

Hailing from Italy, Japan, Korea, the United States and Switzerland, the newest carrier members join over 100 other service providers and technology leaders from around the globe, all focused on collaborating to facilitate harmonization across technologies as well as beyond the traditional networking stack.

“I am delighted to see expanded membership and support from even more of the world’s leading telecom service providers,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager of Networking and Orchestration, The Linux Foundation. “As LFN now enables over 65 percent of the global mobile subscribers, we can better see the impact of open source on the networking ecosystem, signaling a broader industry trend toward innovation, harmonization and accelerated deployment.”

“As a leading telecom company, we put great importance in network automation that utilizes open source to cope with maintenance and management of both virtualized and existing network complexly,” said Yoshiaki Uchida, senior managing executive officer, Director of KDDI. “We are eager to continue to work with the ONAP community to further progress network management for the 5G era.”

“5G technology is expected to dynamically provide various high-quality applications and services through virtualization-based open source technology. By joining LFN,  KT will actively participate in the open source ecosystem, which is set to lead standardization and development of next-generation 5G networks,” said Dr. Hongbeom Jeon, head of KT Infra Lab. “As a result, we will collectively pioneer the new era of smart and cost-effective 5G platforms.”

“Open source software is a key enabler for the future mobile operators to quickly introduce new services and adapt to the highly dynamic service requirements,” said Jong-Kwan Park, SVP, Head of Network Technology R&D Center, SK Telecom. “5G and rapidly emerging service requirements are posing unprecedented challenge to mobile operators. To address this challenge, network transformation leveraging open source networking software is underway at SK Telecom. As a founding member of Linux Foundation Networking Fund, SK Telecom will continue its efforts towards harmonized and facilitated developments of open source networking projects.”

“Open source is a model that works, allowing for very rapid innovation from within a vibrant community,” said Dr. Ron Marquardt, Vice President of Technology at Sprint. “We’re excited to join LF Networking as we work to make our traditional mobility architectures and software designs more streamlined, efficient, and scalable using a virtualized environment.”

“Swisscom is a supporter of open source and open standards and we appreciate that LFN is strengthening the role of open source in the networking domain,” said Rico Schwendener, head of Innovation, Swisscom.  “We expect projects like ONAP to enable us to head towards more efficient and innovative network operations.”

“Network operators worldwide are experiencing dramatic changes in business and operation models driven by network softwarization,” said Enrico Bagnasco, Technology Innovation head, Telecom Italia. “Telecom Italia has already started a comprehensive digital transformation program, which is addressing network simplification and decommissioning, network functions virtualization and automation, agile operation, and a new generation of OSS. In this framework, we are happy to join LF Networking in a cooperative industry effort to design and harmonize end-to-end solutions to orchestrate and control key features of the future networks using open source.”

Telecom service providers are increasingly developing solutions and deploying LFN projects within their networks, with ONAP, OPNFV and ODL  as critical components to enable SDN/NFV, 5G, big data, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) network services.

Meanwhile, LFN’s robust community of carriers – which includes AT&T,  Bell Canada, China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom, Comcast, KT, KDDI, Orange, PCCW Global, Reliance Jio, SK Telecom, Turk Telecom, Verizon, and Vodafone and others – are leveraging various components and functionalities of LFN project platforms for VNF onboarding, orchestration, service delivery, network reconstruction, and more.

About The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and industry adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

###

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.