NBN, the company building Australia’s wholesale broadband access network, has become the first Australian commercial network operator to gain membership to global open networking standards body, the Open Networking Foundation (ONF).
Industry bodies like ONF break down inflexible systems and allow operators to pick the best-in-breed component for their organisation by providing access to open-source software and hardware. Traditional proprietary platforms can create a vendor ‘lock-in’, causing operators to become dependent on a specific vendor for hardware, software and services, which makes switching to other solutions more complex and costly.
Membership in ONF is expected to give NBN Co global insights as the telecommunications industry begins moving away from traditional single-purpose, proprietary platforms towards open and flexible lower-cost solutions.
The immediate opportunity for NBN Co in joining ONF is the ability to interact directly with a community of over 100 partners to begin investigating the company’s current and future network needs.
Ray Owen, CTO, nbn co
Joining the ONF and its push for more open standards on networking deployment is a demonstration of our commitment to find innovative ways to deploy and manage the network. By investigating open-source software and building on the work already done by the ONF, we can aim to drive programmable network architectures through disaggregation of control.
Timon Sloane, VP of Marketing and Ecosystem, Open Networking Foundation
ONF's SEBA project virtualises broadband access to create a single access network regardless of the last mile technology used for each subscriber. Currently supporting XGS-PON and G-PON, our community would like to see SEBA expanded to support additional flavours of PON, DSL, DOCSIS and more.
