ONAP issued its third code release today, Casablanca, which reminded me of the movie “Casablanca,” where Humphrey Bogart says, “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.” Okay. It’s a stretch to compare some code from ONAP to a famous movie, but ONAP is actually showing up everywhere, including some unlikely places.

Today’s release introduces two new blueprints: a cross-carrier blueprint and a 5G blueprint.

The cross-carrier blueprint has already been demonstrated by China Mobile and Vodafone, along with Huawei. These parties used the cross-carrier virtual private network (CCVPN) blueprint to connect their networks across regions. “This is significant because China is big, and Vodafone’s region is big: and because of the fact that you can run ONAP instances in a standardized MEF way,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager of networking with the Linux Foundation Networking (LFN) Fund.

The second blueprint in Casablanca is the 5G blueprint. Joshipura said in the past when the mobile network was upgraded, it was upgraded in phases. “First you got the radio right, then the devices right, then the backend network automation right,” he said. “This time, we need to get radio right. But then while we get the devices right, we also need to get the backend automation ready.”

The ONAP 5G blueprint will extend orchestration and automation to the RAN. It will optimize the network via analytics. And it will address network slicing.

These blueprints join more than 30 projects within ONAP.

Who’s Using ONAP?

Obviously, AT&T and China Mobile are using ONAP, as the carriers were both major contributors of the initial ONAP code.

And Bell Canada has used the ONAP Amsterdam Release in production since the fourth quarter of 2017. Bell Canada also recently launched its new Virtual Network Services (VNS) SD-WAN that taps into ONAP.

But with the release of Casablanca, the LFN spelled out the work that some other operators are doing with ONAP, including Vodafone mentioned above. Other operators are using ONAP as follows:

  • Orange is making ONAP mandatory in its 5G requests for proposals.
  • China Telecom is doing trials on a cloud-connectivity service using ONAP. And it hosted the development forum to kick off the planning for Casablanca.
  • Verizon is on-boarding VNFs and performing service orchestration with ONAP code.
  • Turk Telekom plans production use of ONAP for SD-WAN in early 2019 using the Casablanca release.
  • Deutsche Telecom (DT) joined as a Platinum member of LFN in 2018, and the service provider has installed all ONAP releases in its Deutsche Telekom Lab.
  • Finally, Reliance Jio is adopting ONAP as part of its network build. And it’s incorporating use cases and on-boarding VNFs in trials.
Vendors Commercializing ONAP

Besides operators, more vendors are creating commercial products and services with ONAP. Amdocs has been heavily involved with ONAP from the beginning. It implemented ONAP on Microsoft Azure. This enables operators to deliver virtual network services running on Azure, while being orchestrated and managed using ONAP.

Other vendors creating commercial ONAP products include:

  • Aarna Networks, an ONAP startup, created an ONAP development distribution that can be used on Google Cloud or a single bare metal server for PoCs and development purposes.
  • Accenture created ONAP-as-a-Service for comprehensive digital transformation.
  • ARRIS is including ONAP within its Software Solution Services for orchestration and automation.
  • Ericsson’s Orchestrator and Network Manager both incorporate ONAP components.
  • Fujitsu’s microservice within ONAP manages threshold alarms to respond to needs such as additional bandwidth, and it automatically resets to normal allocations when typical traffic patterns re-emerge.
  • Huawei is building design-time and run-time commercial platforms based on ONAP.
  • IBM offers ONAP on IBM Cloud Private, which is a Kubernetes-based deployment for on premise, bundled with capabilities from open source and IBM.
  • Netsia built a custom user interface in ONAP for RAN slicing and is working on full ONAP integration for a Turkish service provider.
  • Nokia offers cloud-wise services for ONAP with integration services for customer environments and multi-vendor NFV.
  • Wipro is contributing enhanced self-organizing network (SON) functionality to ONAP.
  • ZTE is contributing technology to enable ETSI MANO in ONAP.