AT&T is teaming up with ON.Lab and the ONOS Project to produce a proof-of-concept trial of CORD -- the Central Office Re-architected as Data Center. ONOS, AT&T, PMC-Sierra, and Sckipio will show off CORD next week at the Open Networking Summit in Santa Clara, Calif.

CORD's infrastructure is built on white boxes, ONOS (the open source network operating system curated by ON.Lab), OpenStack, and XOS open source orchestration, Features from contributing organizations would help service providers create the services up top.

The CORD PoC was defined by AT&T and ON.Lab in January. The idea was rooted in AT&T's experience in deploying and managing large networks. Telco central offices of today are weighty in terms of capex and opex. CORD aims to combine software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), and cloud with commodity hardware and open source software, giving the central office the economics of a data center and the agility of the cloud.

AT&T brought PMC and Sckipio to the table and offered resources amounting to half of the CORD engineering team.

Besides its budgetary benefits, CORD offers a number of opportunities for quick service creation, ONOS claims. The main use cases will be virtualization and disaggregation of devices in the central office, but self-service customer premises equipment (CPE) is another possibility. With CORD, users could plug in their own CPE and remotely sign up for services.

After the live demo next week, CORD will undergo a lab trial in December, aiming for trial deployments next year. ONOS says it is aiming for full deployment of CORD at the end of 2016 or early 2017. Throughout this year and next, the CORD partnership will continue to expand, introducing white box and software vendors as new members.