Comcast, the cable and Internet service provider giant, has joined the OpenDaylight Project as the open source group's first end-user member.

A participant in OpenDaylight's user advisory group since the committee's founding in January, Comcast has now signed on as a silver-level sponsor. (Lenovo also joined today at the silver level.) Using the advisory group as a stepping stone, OpenDaylight hopes to attract other user-members, sources say, with further announcements expected in coming months.

"Comcast is motivated to reduce the operational complexity of our networks," Chris Luke, a senior principal engineer at Comcast, wrote in a blog post explaining the move. "We’re working toward creating an architecture where the core of the network is not intimately involved in the operation of virtual networks."

Two of Comcast's early proofs-of-concept with the OpenDaylight platform involved network intelligence abstraction, or allowing applications to query the network without adding complexity to the forwarding plane, and overlay edge services, which use IPv6 as an underlay at the network edge.

Through the industry-backed research consortium CableLabs, Comcast has also contributed code to OpenDaylight's PacketCable PCMM project, a southbound plug-in that would allow the OpenDaylight controller to provision a cable modem termination system (CMTS) as a network element managing service flows with dynamic QoS.

This post has been corrected to reflect that Lenovo is a silver member of OpenDaylight.