Seventy percent of respondents to an IHS Markit survey plan to deploy CORD in their central offices — 30 percent by the end of 2017 and an additional 40 percent in 2018 or later.
The findings come from IHS Markit’s 2016 Routing, NFV & Packet-Optical Strategies Service Provider Survey.
The Central Office Re-Architected as a Data Center (CORD) combines network functions virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN) to bring data center economics and cloud agility to the telco central office. CORD garnered so much attention in 2016 that its originator — On.Lab‘s Open Network Operating System (ONOS) — established CORD as a separate open source entity. And non-telcos have joined the open source group, including Google and Comcast.
IHS Markit found that 95 percent of operators surveyed are using or planning to deploy servers and storage in selected central offices to create mini data centers to offer cloud services. And they will use them as the NFV infrastructure on which to run virtual network functions (VNFs).
The survey results are based on interviews with router purchase decision-makers at 20 global service providers that control 36 percent of worldwide telecom capex and a third of revenue.
In other survey findings, operator respondents indicated that 100-Gb/s Ethernet is the wave of the future. They said that it will make up 38 percent of their 10-, 40- and 100-Gb/s Ethernet port purchases during 2018, which is more than two times that of 2016.
In addition, 70 percent of operators surveyed are deploying packet-optical transport systems (P-OTS) or plan to do so by 2018. Between 2016 and 2018, the percentage of nodes with P-OTS is anticipated to grow six-fold in core/long haul and almost double in access, aggregation, metro core, and regional.
“We believe these plans will keep a damper on router sales,” writes IHS Markit senior research director Michael Howard in a summary of the report. “And despite much industry talk, respondents have little current demand for a multilayer data/transport control plane.”