SANTA CLARA, California — A major tier-one operator deployed Trellis, an open source SDN-based platform, in its production network, said AT&T’s Andre Fuetsch during his keynote at the Open Networking Foundation’s ONF Connect event today.

Fuetsch is AT&T’s chief technology officer and the president of AT&T Labs. He also chairs the ONF board, and during his Wednesday morning keynote he updated the operator-led consortium on the group’s various open source SDN projects. This includes Trellis, which Fuetsch said one of the “largest tier-one operators has taken on” and deployed the platform in production.

While he didn’t name the operator, Comcast has led the work on the open source platform. And, along with AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, and Infosys, Comcast authored a reference design for Trellis in April.

Trellis is a multi-purpose, leaf-spine fabric designed for NFV. It combines an underlay leaf-spine fabric, overlay virtual networking, and unified SDN control over both underlay and overlay.

“Trellis uses OpenFlow-enabled white box switches, coupled with a control plane powered by [the Open Network Operating System] ONOS, and it creates a highly scalable, highly robust, distributed leaf-spine fabric,” Fuetsch said. “It really is a great testament from the standpoint that it validates the production readiness of both ONOS as an SDN control plane and Trellis as an SDN fabric. That is something that is really going to open the door up to many new capabilities down the road that ONF is working on.”

In addition to Trellis and ONOS, several other ONF projects are nearing production readiness, Fuetsch said. These include SDN Enabled Broadband Access (SEBA), Virtual OLT Hardware Abstraction (VOLTHA), and Open Mobile Evolved Core (OMEC).

“We have an acceleration plan to get SEBA established for operator deployments in the coming months,” Fuetsch said, adding that AT&T has deployed live field trials of SEBA in Atlanta and Irving, Texas. The operator is using the platform to provide low-latency home internet access via white box hardware to 500 homes.

“We’re really excited about it, not just because it’s helping us with delivering gigabit-plus speed and services to our customers, but it’s also a technology that is really access independent,” he said. It supports “not just to fiber access but multiple modes of access. So that, to us, is very powerful as we build our networks.”

AT&T is also building a blueprint to plug SEBA into Akraino, an open source edge computing software stack, Fuetsch added.

Additionally, Deutsche Telekom is in field trials with SEBA, and previously said the platform is helping it cut costs, increase automation, and reduce time to market for services.

Meanwhile Deutsche Telekom and Sprint are also working on OMEC. Sprint and ONF co-launched the open source, CUPS compliant mobile packet core project in February. And Intel is working with Sprint and Deutsche Telekom to complete a live trial with a customer before the end of the year, Fuetsch said.

Looking ahead, the future of ONF is Stratum, Fuetsch said, referring to the silicon-independent switch operating system for software-defined networks that ONF open sourced this week.

Stratum, which runs on a variety of switching silicon and various white box switch platforms, will be the foundation for ONF’s next-generation SDN stack, according to the group. “This is going to give us a nice bridge to start enabling this real time, fully programmable control all the way down to the silicon,” Fuetsch said. “We’re really excited about the capabilities here of what Stratum is going to do, and how it’s going to help drive ONOS and Trellis and SEBA to the future.”

ONF, founded by Deutsche Telekom, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Verizon, and Yahoo in 2011, originally led the SDN charge with OpenFlow. This allows the control plane to interact with the forwarding plane in an SDN environment.

But at the time, “we were all trying to figure out what SDN was exactly, and how it was going to solve all these network challenges we have,” Fuetsch said. Fast forward eight years and “SDN is now becoming the network,” he added, touting his own company’s SDN milestone announced today.

“White box hardware coupled with open source software creates this disaggregated, virtualized, and software-defined environment that finally gives us a chance to survive all this growth and change,” he said. “But it really does more than that — it allows us to get ahead of it.”