This year hasn’t gone according to plan for any business or person, but AT&T this week said its goal to deploy nationwide 5G this summer and virtualize 75% of its core network functions by year-end remains on track.

A rapid increase in network traffic following lockdowns to slow the spread of COVID-19 has reinforced and motivated AT&T’s engineers to meet those objectives, Scott Mair, president of AT&T Technology Operations, explained in a blog post.

The amount of data traversing AT&T’s network was already increasing steadily before the pandemic hit, but stay-at-home orders effectively “sent core network traffic levels up 20% or more almost overnight,” he wrote. “In the face of that historic demand, though, our network teams both kept the current systems running smoothly and have continued to deliver on our long-term innovation strategy.”

AT&T had previously noted that customer connections into its SD-WAN Static Network Based product surged 700% tied to the ongoing COVID-19 virus outbreak. However, it noted that it has been able to maintain network performance because of the platform’s cloud-based nature.

The operator still plans to hit its goal of placing 75% of its core network function under SDN control and it’s continuing to deploy 400-gigabit fiber across its network, according to Mair. That SDN goal, which was first announced in 2014, has been tangled in some ambiguity. 

The operator earlier this year said it virtualized 71% of its network and at the time clarified that the goal would be met by the end of 2020, not “by 2020” as originally stated. Meanwhile, AT&T said it recently met its commitment to make AT&T Fiber available at more than 14 million locations.

Those efforts are part of the seven principles that AT&T outlined in a recent white paper to describe how it’s transforming its network infrastructure. “It’s a transformation that must start from the network edge — where customers actually connect to the network, such as over 5G or fiber — and extend to the network core with disaggregation and SDN,” Mair wrote. 

Those principles include: interoperability and open disaggregation; white box hardware and software; network edge densification; a cloud-native network core; an evolution of the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) for diverse NFV orchestration models; cloud-based machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI); and network security.

AT&T also announced that it’s joining the global Open COVID Pledge to make its patents that might aid in the fight against the virus available free of charge. “We generate roughly five patents every business day at AT&T, and I’m hopeful our [work] can be helpful in this initiative,” Mair wrote. 

Finally, AT&T shared some updates on the Airship open infrastructure project, including plans to enable a “multi-year transition from VNF (virtual network function) to CNF (cloud-native network function) without the need to support two sets of NFVI (NFV infrastructure),” explained Ryan van Wyk, VP of network cloud at AT&T, in a blog post. 

Airship 2.0, which is expected to be delivered later this year, keys in on that effort, according to van Wyk. “Airship 2.0 is providing a declarative interface that assembles and orchestrates the best-of-breed Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) building blocks needed for the job of provisioning and complete life cycle management of the full-stack cloud infrastructure using Kubernetes containers,” he wrote.

“Airship 2.0 takes each of these CNCF projects and provides the glue that not only serves to provide a functional end-to-end integration, but a smooth operator experience tying all these projects together,” van Wyk added.

While Airship is designed to deliver an integrated platform that operators can use with relative ease, the project remains open, he added, and also “highly decomposable allowing you to pick and choose what components make sense.”