The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) today revealed Ananki, a new corporate entity to push its Aether project as a commercialized private 5G service.

Aether, which late last year received $30 million in funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), includes ONF’s SD-Core, SD-Fabric, and SD-RAN projects. The trio of Kubernetes-based, open source projects form the primary layers of ONF's project for private network architecture.

SD-RAN, a cloud native open radio access network (RAN) project, pulls architecture and specifications from the O-RAN Alliance to help enterprise developers overcome hurdles in the near real-time RAN intelligent controller. SD-Core disaggregates mobile network core architecture for private 5G enterprise services, and ONF describes SD-Fabric as a full stack and programmable 5G network fabric designed for hybrid cloud, edge, and IoT applications.

Ananki simplifies the path to private 5G deployment for enterprises that prefer a commercial service, Timon Sloane, ONF’s VP of marketing, explained in a phone interview.

“There is no other open source alternative,” he claimed, adding that Aether remains housed as an open source project managed by ONF. 

“Ananki is consuming the open source just like any other company is free to consume the open source, but is then packaging it, wrapping it with some additional capabilities and delivering it in a way where you can just point and click, turn it up,” Sloane said.

Ananki is a software-defined service integrated with hyperscaler and edge frameworks that supports multi-cloud platforms. The public benefit corporation is funded with investments from unnamed business partners and venture capitalists, according to Sloane, and the $30 million DARPA grant continues to fund development of the technology. 

ONF and Ananki share executive teams and Ananki’s business will contribute back to the open source projects at ONF. 

“We’ve seen the world shift over the last 20 years. Open source has become more and more important for a whole suite of reasons and we think it’s poised to play that same kind of importance in the private 5G space,” Sloane added. 

ONF always envisioned a commercialized version of its Aether project, but didn’t necessarily expect it would be the one to do it, according to Sloane. 

“We always imagined that the Red Hats of this space would appear,” he said. “We’ve always wanted to see the same happen with ONF, but our observation is that it hasn’t happened.”

While enterprises could build a team of 5G engineers, consume open source technologies, and build something effective, “they could also just redeploy that energy and those dollars toward people that are more core to their central differentiators in the market," Sloane said.

“Our belief is that the dollars on the Ananki side are certainly much, much less upfront without question. And it gets you there faster, in a faster time to market,” he said. “But even over a multi-year time horizon, I would expect it would be less expensive using Ananki. And you’re able to use all that effort to solve their larger business problems rather than focus just on the 5G component.”