ORLANDO, Fla. — AT&T, Orange, and a handful of technology partners are attempting to shrink the world by using inter-provider application programming interfaces (APIs) to provision Ethernet services. The companies demonstrated a proof of concept of this at this week’s MEF17 event.

Tapping into the MEF’s recently released Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) Sonata software development kit (SDK), the demonstration showed an automated, real-time ordering, and provisioning of the software-defined networking (SDN)-based services across AT&T's network and Orange's network. This involved the interaction of both operators' SDN architectures.

The demonstration used elements of the MEF LSO integration points to show orchestrated, on-demand, API-driven, customer control of network resources. Those included cloud and on premises infrastructure from a single enterprise controller.

John Medamana, vice president for packet-optical network at AT&T, said the service allows a customer based in the U.S. to see if a service is available on a specific street in London, and then send the order along for near instantaneous provisioning.

The PoC partners included Colt Technology Services, Ciena, Amdocs, and Fujitsu.

Gabriel Kerner, vice president for network product and offerings at Amdocs, said the PoC solves significant challenges for enterprise customers in integrating service requests across operational and business support systems.

Colt plans to integrate the service capability into a customer-facing SDN API that allows customers to control services regardless of underlying network infrastructure.

Colt and AT&T late last year completed an initial test of the capabilities. The companies at that time said they planned to share the network-to-network interface and open API code with standards bodies and industry forums.

MEF released Sonata last month at the SDN and NFV World Congress in The Hague, Netherlands.

“This is standardizing the way two operators will communicate orchestration,” Arpit Joshipura, general manager of networking and orchestration with the Linux Foundation, told SDxCentral.

Both AT&T and Orange are involved in Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP), which helped make the PoC happen. Medamana said the evolution of ONAP was one of a number of “things that came together over the past year” to help with the PoC.

ONAP counts a number of large operators as platinum members, including AT&T, China Mobile, and Orange. The latest to join that group is Türk Telekom, which joined the organization this week.

AT&T's leadership has hinted that ONAP will be announcing more members in the coming weeks. The organization is also set to unveil its first release, dubbed Amsterdam.