Bell Canada, which provides communications services to 21 million customers in the provinces of Quebec and Ontario and in the Northwest Territories, is testing AT&T’s ECOMP platform.

Bell Canada plans to use the Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management, and Policy (ECOMP) platform to create and manage software-defined networks (SDN). AT&T built ECOMP internally for its own use. It says it has had it in production for over two years. In the first quarter of 2017, the will make the code available as open source through the Linux Foundation.

According to today’s announcement, Bell Canada is committed to using SDN within both its wireless and wireline networks. The company operates an LTE-Advanced wireless network and a broadband fiber network.

Bell is the second telecom company to join with AT&T on ECOMP. Orange was the first, announcing in September that it was working with AT&T to trial the platform.

“It’s exciting to see the communications industry coalescing around ECOMP,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at the Linux Foundation, in a prepared statement. “ECOMP is the most comprehensive and complete architecture for virtual network function (VNF)/SDN automation we have seen.”

Zemlin’s comment is interesting given the fact that ECOMP may end up competing to some extent with another Linux Foundation NFV project — OpenO.