Volta Networks today announced a deal to bring its virtual routing software to Edgecore’s open networking switches. The Volta Elastic Virtual Routing Engine (VERVE) is being readied for network operators to deploy on Edgecore’s AS7316-26XB cell site gateway switch.

The software provider claims it can support up to 255 routing engines per white box switch. By disaggregating hardware from software, the cloud-based routing platform can provide multiple services on top of white boxes at a total cost of ownership up to 90% lower than legacy routing vendors, according to the vendor.

“When we look at an apples-to-apples [comparison] from legacy vendors, it’s just a lot less expensive to use a disaggregated approach,” said Hugh Kelly, vice president of marketing at Volta. VERVE was among the finalists for the Telecom Infrastructure Project’s Disaggregated Cell Site Gateway technical specification, which aims to allow network operators to deploy white box cell site gateways with support for Layer 2, Layer 4, and MPLS.

Volta’s virtual route processors can be assigned to physical or logical ports on open networking switches and the control plane, which is separated from the data plan, can run on public, private or hybrid clouds. “[Network operators] want to be able to run MPLS out of the cell tower so it’s important to have a full featured carrier-grade, carrier-feature oriented software stack,” Kelly said.

Volta is, Kelly added, also a “big believer in open source,” and an active participant in the Free Range Routing Community, a Linux Foundation project. Router protocols are “pretty much standardized,” but it’s the implementation of the protocol that differentiates Volta, he explained.

Volta contrasts sharply with legacy router vendors like Cisco or Juniper Networks that sell hardware with a route switch processor that runs all of the routing protocols, Kelly said.

“Our approach is we’re basically taking all of the software that we typically run in our routing engine and moving it into the cloud,” he said. “Now because it’s running in the cloud we can then create multiple routing engines all running simultaneously and then associate those with any given white box switch.”

As cell sites proliferate during 5G buildouts, Volta sees an opportunity to help network operators share radio access networks, deliver new services to small- and medium-sized businesses, and eventually enable network slicing. “Mobile virtual routers have a lot of interesting applications,” Kelly said.