AT&T is First in Industry to Deploy Dis-Aggregated Core Router

AT&T* today announced that a next-gen open dis-aggregated core routing platform has been deployed into their production environment with support from Broadcom, DriveNets, and UfiSpace. This is coupled with the deployment of the company’s next gen long haul 400G optical transport platform, giving AT&T the network infrastructure needed to transport the tsunami of demand that will be generated by 5G, fiber-based broadband and entertainment content services in the years ahead.

“I’m proud to announce today that we have now deployed a next gen IP/MPLS core routing platform into our production network based on the open hardware designs we submitted to OCP last fall,” said Andre Fuetsch, AT&T’s CTO of Network Services, in his keynote speech at the Open Networking and Edge Summit (ONES). “We chose DriveNets, a disruptive supplier, to provide the Network Operating System (NOS) software for this core use case.”

The open hardware uses Broadcom’s Jericho2 family of merchant silicon and Distributed, Dis-aggregated Chassis (DDC) design which allows graceful horizontal scale. The Jericho2 chips provide the density, scale and features needed to support the requirements of a service provider.

The white box hardware was designed and manufactured by UfiSpace. It consists of three components: a 40x100G line card system, 10x400G line card system, and a 48x400G fabric system. These building blocks can be deployed in various configurations to build routers with capacity anywhere between 4 Tbps to 192 Tbps.

DriveNets Network Cloud solution and its innovative Network Operating System (NOS) software provides the management and control of the white box hardware. It supports a sophisticated set of traffic engineering features that enable highly reliable and efficient MPLS transport for our global, multi-service core backbone. The software then connects into AT&T’s centralized SDN controller that optimizes the routing of traffic across the core.

“We are thrilled about this opportunity to work with AT&T on the development of their next gen, software-based core network,” said Ido Susan, CEO of DriveNets. “AT&T has a rigorous certification process that challenged my engineers to their limits, and we are delighted to take the project to the next level with deployment into the production network.”

“In the coming weeks, we’ll announce additional software suppliers for other use cases operating on the same hardware, demonstrating the maturity of the eco-system and power of openness,” Fuetsch said.