The Telecom Infra Project (TIP) said that it’s making progress on its Disaggregated Cell Site Gateways (DCSG) technology and that Telefónica will be commercially deploying the open mobile transport protocol at scale in Germany.

DCSG is comprised of a white-box cell site gateway based on open and disaggregated architecture for 3G, 4G, and 5G networks. Infinera and Edgecore Networks are active participants in TIP and are providing hardware — Infinera’s DRX-30 and the Edgecore’s AS7315-27X-DCSG — to advance the technology.

The vendors claim that Infinera’s Converged Network Operating System (CNOS) combined with Infinera or Edgecore Networks’ equipment will provide operators with IP/MPLS functionality for cell site gateways. DCSG will also enable operators to connect multiple gateway elements to double node capacity while operating under a single routing framework.

“We are excited to mark the industry’s first adoption of DCSG technology in a large-scale deployment,” said Victor López, network architect at Telefónica and co-chair of the Open Optical Packet Transport group at TIP, in a prepared statement. “Active collaboration between leading global service providers and systems suppliers in TIP’s open community has been critical to advancing carrier-class DCSG implementations that are beginning to deliver real-world value.”

Javier Gavilán, Telefónica’s chief technology innovation officer and director of core, network platforms, and transport, said the operator is committed to an open networking strategy to facilitate the ongoing transformation of its network. The operator previously announced that Infinera’s DRX series of hardware will be used in its nationwide mobile transport network in Germany as it continues to expand 5G services.

“Through rigorous testing and design, we are pleased to collaborate with Edgecore Networks to pioneer and deploy solutions to TIP’s DCSG specifications and to mark this milestone for our open networking with the first volume commercial deployment of the technology now underway,” said Mikko Hannula, VP of engineering and product management at Infinera, in a prepared statement.

Mark Basham, VP of business development at Edgecore Networks, noted that the companies have demonstrated the benefits of disaggregated and open network solutions, and that the open mobile transport DSCG initiative is an example of that work in action.

TIP is expected to share more details about the DSCG progress and other projects when the TIP Summit gets underway in Amsterdam tomorrow.

AT&T has also embraced a disaggregated and open approach to cell site routing traffic. The company said its cell-site white box routers were in large-scale production carrying live network traffic in late 2018.

Earlier this year, AT&T demonstrated a white box cell site gateway router that supports high bandwidth requirements for 5G cell site backhaul, boasting speeds up to 100 Gb/s. It also, at the time, announced that its white box switches that interconnect servers in the network cloud are live and carrying 5G traffic.

AT&T designed its own open hardware to create white box routers that will run open source software and previously announced plans to install more than 60,000 open source powered white boxes across its network during the next couple years. The operator recently submitted specifications for a distributed disaggregated chassis (DDC) white box router to the Open Compute Project.

The operator also plans to donate its Disaggregated Network Operating System (DANOS) open source code into the Linux Foundation this week, completing a process that was originally announced in early 2018.