Radisys, Calix Take CORD Residential
Remember the effort we’ve written about in the past called CORD that aims to make telco central offices more like data centers? Well Calix Inc. and Radisys Corp. today unveiled what they say is the first CORD platform designed to address residential services.
It employs the Calix AXOS E9-2 Intelligent Edge Systems, which includes the AOS OFx Connector, and the Radisys OCP-based DCEngine 16U platform. And it aims to help service providers more quickly deliver existing services and introduce new services while keeping their costs manageable.
Multiple tier 1 service providers are currently doing trials of the Calix-Radisys R-CORD solution, according to the companies.
CORD, which stands for Central Office Re-architected as a Data Center, is a concept that combines the cloud, commodity infrastructure, NFV, open building blocks, and SDN to bring the agility of the cloud and the economies of scale found in the data center to service provider networks. That spans from the equipment at the home or office customer premises, to the access part of the network, to the telco’s central office.
Google hosted the first CORD Summit last summer at its Sunnyvale,CA, headquarters. Many of the world’s largest telcos are involved with CORD as well.
For example, in August there were reports that AT&T was conducting a field trial of CORD in Georgia. And in a recent interview with INTERNET TELEPHONY, Patricia Chang, senior manager of technology and architecture at Verizon, said Verizon is working with AT&T, SK Telecom, Intel, and Radisys on a mobile version of CORD known as M-CORD. That’s attractive to Verizon, she added, because of its openness and time-to-market benefits.
M-CORD aims to lay the foundation for 5G cellular networking and services through support for disaggregated and virtualized evolved packet core, end-to-end slicing from RAN to EPC, mobile edge computing, and programmable radio access network. Slicing will come in handy for Internet of Things applications in which the IoT device needs just a small slice of the network, explained Chang. It also makes sense for broadcast events that require network resources only for a limited period of time, she added.
Edited by Alicia Young
