AT&T CTO Andre Fuetsch today gave no indication that the operator plans to relinquish its role as an industry leader on network virtualization, open source technology, or open radio access network (RAN) architecture.

The carrier has invested more than $135 billion in its U.S. infrastructure during the past five years to build a robust network with self-healing architectures and open standards, he said at the Open Networking & Edge Executive Forum.

“A lot of this was started with a program about seven years ago” when “we set out to virtualize and software enable the majority of our network. And this is really the foundation of everything we do, and part of this really important foundation is open source technology,” Fuetsch said. 

“The advances we’ve made in cloud-native virtualization, containerization, hardware and software disaggregation have really allowed us to reach our software based networking goals of 75%,” he said. “I’m proud to say that we not only hit that goal but we surpassed it, and right now we’re well over 77%.”

The operator hit that 75% target either three months early or nine months late, based on a series of confusing and previously contradictory executive statements.

The completion of that goal coupled with key executive departures indicated a shift in strategy that suggested AT&T no longer intended to be a trailblazer on those efforts, Roy Rubenstein, consultant at LightCounting, told SDxCentral last month.

Fuetsch didn’t directly address those perceptions during his keynote, but he did highlight the many open source projects and communities that helped AT&T reach its goal and said the operator will continue working with and contributing to many network modernization efforts. He did, however, detail some internal shuffling moves AT&T has undertaken since the beginning of 2021.

The knowledge, people, tools, and systems “within AT&T that were incubated in this more central area within the network” and distributed those resources out into more business units, Fuetsch said. The goal is to make its revamped network infrastructure and tools broadly available to AT&T’s divisions to enable and make the knowledge, capabilities, and toolsets that utilize that data available for wider use, he explained.

“At a high level we see a distribution of that talent going in all areas of the business,” Fuetsch said.

“Having a much more software centric network really enables us to respond rapidly to any new demand on the network, even those that are caused by pandemics,” he added.

Fuetsch called out six open source projects of particular importance to AT&T and its network vision for the next decade, including the Open Compute Project (OCP), Airship, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, (CNCF), the O-RAN Alliance, Anuket, and the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP).

The operator’s work with OCP includes IP edge routing and core routing software, and white box routers. “This is really the start of a journey to converge the disparate edge implementations we have today on to a more common software and hardware driving platform that really delivers uniformity, simplification, and agility,” Fuetsch said. “This is what’s really going to power our network for the next decade as we see continued growth, I call it the tsunami of demand that hits our network each and every day.”

Airship, which he described as a network cloud infrastructure that integrates about 14 CNCF projects forms the basis of AT&T’s network cloud, which is in production today. This enables faster deployments, greater scale, consistency, and security as needed, he claimed. 

Airship is also now a certified Kubernetes distribution under CNCF’s conformance program, a designation that he said provides multiple benefits, including consistent interaction with users, timely updates, and confirmed conformance with identical open source applications.

Anuket, a merging earlier this year of the Common NFVi Telco Taskforce (CNTT) and the Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV), will “empower the global communications community” by coalescing various reference cloud infrastructure models and architectures to speed up deployments with greater reliability and security, Fuetsch explained. 

Finally, he provided an update about AT&T’s open RAN ambitions, describing developments in the O-RAN Alliance and open RAN software community as “important and very complimentary open initiatives.” The carrier’s recent virtualized RAN test with Nokia is “key milestone” that proves the maturity and capability of open architecture, he said.

“The goal of open RAN is to really enable new participants to come into the RAN space by disaggregating the RAN with open interfaces, and the open RAN software community continues to grow it,” Fuetsch said.

ONAP is of particular interest to AT&T because its alignment with the O-RAN Alliance positions it to serve as an open sourced implementation of open RAN service management and orchestration and a near real-time RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC), he explained. 

“As we all know, data is the lifeblood of a network,” Fuetsch said. “If you want to drive a really intelligent, agile network you’ve got to have lots of data and you also have to have a lot of capabilities. We’re looking to artificial intelligence and machine learning type implementations to drive better orchestration and control, and ONAP is a great platform for us to really pull that together.”