BOSTON — The Open Compute Project (OCP) initially focused on data centers. And since the open source project began in 2011 it has quickly flourished, supporting open hardware projects.

Bill Carter, the chief technology officer at OCP, said that next week the telco working group within OCP is meeting, and it plans to discuss universal customer premises equipment (uCPE).

Both Verizon and AT&T belong to the OCP telco group, so it’s reasonable to speculate they might be part of any future uCPE work within OCP.

“AT&T was one of the earlier contributors of a project through the telco working group,” said Carter. “They open-sourced a GPON box; that specification has been shared since 2015.”

Verizon hasn’t made any product contributions to date. But the OCP telco working group is co-chaired by Bryan Larish, a director of technology at Verizon.

“Next Monday, we’re going to discuss universal CPE,” said Carter. “I expect that we will have members in our community that will define specs for CPE equipment and potentially see some open source CPE within the telco working group of OCP.”

The timing of the work within OCP is interesting because Verizon recently unveiled its own white box CPE. The company told SDxCentral about it last week at the NFV World Congress, prior to Verizon’s official announcement.

OCP Primer

At the OpenStack Summit 2017 today, Carter also provided some basic background on OCP.

“People in open source software have no idea what’s happening in the hardware world and vice versa,” he said. “OCP is the hardware equivalent of OpenStack.”

OCP organizes its work into nine different groups:

1. Compliance & Interoperability
2. Data Center
3. Hardware Management
4. HPC
5. Networking
6. Open Rack
7. Server
8. Storage
9. Telco

“The most popular project is the networking project,” said Carter. “That reflects upon the trend in the industry to disaggregate the traditional switch and run open source software on a white box switch.”

About 11 different switch suppliers have worked with OCP to get their open source products OCP-certified. Those suppliers include Edgecore, Alpha Networks, Mellanox, and Barefoot Networks. Carter said HPE has also created a white-box switch — its Altoline — that is currently being looked at by the OCP technical committee.

Although networking has become popular within OCP, the OCP project initially focused on compute (hence its name), creating white box servers for data centers. “We were spawned from Rackspace and Facebook,” said Carter. “Traditional servers had a lot of baggage; features that were never used in a cloud-based situation.”