CenturyLink Delivers Broadband Services on CORD Platform

Less than one year after AT&T took its Central Office Re-architected as a Data center (CORD) to the Linux Foundation, which then produced a reference design, CenturyLink, Inc.  says it is the first carrier to use its own virtualized Broadband Network Gateway (vBNG) to support broadband services using the a CORD based design.

This key step in CenturyLink’s efforts to virtualize its infrastructure within the central office is part of the company’s commitment to have full global virtualization coverage in its IP core network by the end of 2019.

Through CORD, CenturyLink is using some version (????) of software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) to bring data center economics and cloud agility to its central offices for fast and efficient delivery of new network services to residential and business customers.

“Our CORD deployment is a significant milestone on our path to achieve full network virtualization,” said Aamir Hussain, CenturyLink’s executive vice president and chief technology officer. “This is a key component in our strategy to bring virtual network services to our customers while driving virtualization into our last-mile network, allowing us to quickly and efficiently deliver new technologies that meet our customers’ rapidly changing needs,” he added.

CenturyLink’s SDN access controller is an OpenDaylight-based controller stack that integrates its legacy operations support systems (OSS) and latest generation orchestration platforms. In addition to virtualizing its infrastructure, CenturyLink continues to develop and implement virtualized services, including a virtual firewall, data center interconnection and software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) for enterprise customers. Through these virtualization efforts, CenturyLink is enhancing the customer experience by providing them with more control of their services.

The carrier said it’s also continuing to create and implement virtualized services along with virtualizing its own infrastructure spread out over 55 global data centers. These virtualized services include a virtual firewall, datacenter interconnection and software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) targeting enterprises.

Author’s Notes:

There are no implementation standards/interface specs for SD-WAN so there’s no vendor interoperability and hence, it’s a turnkey single vendor solution for a carrier.

While same is true for NFV, but the OPEN NFV (OPNFV) open source group is effectively creating a defacto standard by agreeing to a spec prior to generating open source code.

References:

https://virtualizationreview.com/articles/2017/03/23/centurylink-cord.aspx

http://www.lightreading.com/services/broadband-services/centurylink-is-first-carrier-to-deliver-broadband-services-on-cord-platform/d/d-id/731458