Blog

Written by Loren Staley, CTO at Edgecore Networks, and Co-lead of Telco Project at OCP, which includes the Edge Sub-Project.  

Technology fuels every aspect of our lives: professional and personal, from medical to educational to entertainment and beyond. Connecting it all is a remarkable global matrix of Telecommunications infrastructure and equipment, one that is continuing to add innovative features while boosting bandwidth to meet our ever increasing need for secure and immediate access to diverse content or allowing machine proxies to share information on our behalf.

The OCP Telco Project, begun in 2015, has accepted open hardware specifications and associated products related to large, disaggregated Core Routers, smaller access oriented Cell Site Routers, and enclosures to efficiently house Mobile Edge Compute (MEC) resources. Many on these products, running a diverse set of Network Operating Systems (NOS) with additional Telecom Applications, are either deployed in production environments or entering large-scale proof-of-concept trials to validate solutions built on the OCP disaggregated framework.

Earlier this year, the Telco Project conducted a survey to understand better what aspects of telecom infrastructure were of particular interest to the OCP community. The top two areas of interest were 5G networks and the network edge. 

With this in mind, OCP members are invited to submit proposals for guidelines, best practices, metrics, common challenges, and opportunities for collaboration related to 5G Edge Infrastructure and Edge Application requirements.

Share your ideas on the challenges related to the Mobile Edge: 

1. Requirements concerning Latency for particular Edge Applications, including any application phase breakdown of the targeted Round Trip Time(RTT).

2. Requirements concerning Bandwidth for Edge Applications.

3. NOS requirements, in particular need for Real Time processing features

4. Deployment or POC experiences with Open Edge enclosures

In addition, we would welcome any updates concerning the Disaggregated Data Center (DDC), Cell Site Gateway Aggregators (CSG), Passive Access Networks (PAN) and Cloud Edge as follows:

1. Deployment or Proof of Concept experiences

2. Submitted product updates

The 2021 OCP Global Summit will be a hybrid event, both in person and virtual, and will take place November 9 – 10, 2021 at the San Jose Convention Center in San Jose, CA. To learn more about the Open Compute Project, to see how to get involved, and to attend or exhibit at the upcoming Summit, visit https://www.opencompute.org/summit/global-summit