AT&T and Intel announced an expansion of their long term partnership to include the carrier's network transformation project. AT&T will also join Intel’s “Super 7” - an allince of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and Chinese Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba. The two companies are already partners in a number of areas, including 5G networks and drones.
The partnership will see AT&T using standard Intel Xeon chips to support its virtualized network infrastructure, optimizing NFV packet processing efficiency for AT&T Integrated Cloud, or AIC.
Andre Fuetsch - Senior Vice President of Domain 2.0 Architecture & Design, wrote in a blog post, "Open source software running on hardware powered by Intel chips will enable many of these virtualized network functions. So we’re asking the developer community to stay engaged, too. Open source groups like OpenStack, OPNFV, OpenDaylight, ON.lab, OpenContrail, the Open Compute Project and others are vital to us."
"Consumers are adopting data-hungry apps like virtual reality and augmented reality, 4K video and the Internet of Things. Enterprises want greater and near real-time control of virtualized network functions. We think this Intel collaboration will speed innovation in all those areas and help us stay ahead of demand," he added.
