SANTA CLARA, California — Telecom operators moving to virtualized, cloud-based architectures can save 40% in capex and 25% in opex, according to a study from Arthur D. Little, AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, and Telefónica.

The companies released the study at the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) Connect event this week, and during a panel the three operators discussed what they call a “Central Office pod” or CO pod architecture. It’s essentially an updated version of ONF’s Central Office Rearchitected as a Data Center (CORD) program that is also influenced by the Open Compute Project’s work to drive web-scale technologies into data centers.

CO pod uses a modular approach, and it replaces traditional proprietary networking equipment with general-purpose hardware and SDN managed by standard IT automation tools. This standardized, disaggregated technology is designed to meet operator challenges pertaining to demand growing faster than revenues, technology convergence, and a growing desire to take advantage of a wider range of third-party vendors.

AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, and Telefónica all approach this slightly differently.

AT&T worked to embed cloud technologies across all areas of its business. This can help telecom companies operate more like hyperscale cloud providers and develop and launch new services more rapidly, said Tom Anschutz, a distinguished member of technical staff at AT&T.

“The benefit to convergence is that we’ll find that similar [software] tools…become the basis, the bread and butter of services, communications and otherwise,” Anschutz said.

AT&T uses several ONF and other open source software platforms in its production networks and also in trials with customers — including ONF’s SDN Enabled Broadband Access (SEBA), which the operator is using to provide low-latency home internet access via white box hardware to 500 homes in the U.S.

“In this new phase making commercial products, AT&T sees [SDN] as a strategy,” Anschutz said. “You heard a lot about SEBA, and we think that’s a great way to learn about this new thing.”

Deutsche Telekom focused on bringing down costs of future access platforms, reducing vendor lock-in, and broadening the supplier ecosystem. “The goal is redesign broadband access, focus on automation, bring in commodity and open hardware where it makes sense, and widen the spectrum of possible partners and vendors, but with a clear focus on delivering fixed and mobile access in Germany,” said Hans-Joerg Kolbe, a chief engineer at Deutsche Telekom.

And Telefónica’s efforts centered on combining virtualization and edge computing to create new services and revenue streams.

This included broadcasting and producing television with 5G to enable news coverage of any event in real time with high-quality video. Instead of having the producer on-site at the event, “what we tried to do with this is let the producer be at the central office,” said David Artuñedo Guillén, CEO at OnLife Networks, which is a division of Telefónica.

The trial used television cameras connected to the 5G network with production software installed at the edge, very close to where the cameras are, receiving their images almost immediately with very low latency, according to the operator. It also allowed the TV producer to remotely manage the different inputs while connected to a fiber-optic link.

“At Telefónica, we do believe that this access network virtualization combined with edge computing is a big opportunity,” Guillén said.