AT&T and Verizon Work toward VoLTE Interoperability

Verizon and AT&T are working to establish VoLTE interoperability between their networks.

The companies are working through a full set of requirements, beginning with extensive testing in lab environments and then moving to field trials.  This approach ensures customers will have a seamless experience making VoLTE HD Voice calls between networks and lays the foundation for interoperability of other Rich Communications Services (RCS) such as video calls, rich messaging, and more in the future.


VoLTE interoperability between Verizon and AT&T customers is expected in 2015.  

"Interoperability among all VoLTE providers takes connectivity to the next level with HD quality voice and additional features that customers want," said Tony Melone, chief technology officer at Verizon. "We're pleased to be working with AT&T as our first interoperating carrier, and we look forward to working with other operators as VoLTE continues to grow."

"Interoperability of VoLTE between wireless carriers is crucial to a positive customer experience," said Krish Prabhu, president, AT&T Labs and Chief Technology Officer, AT&T.  "Customers expect to be able to connect anywhere, anytime– and as LTE technology continues to evolve, it's imperative that we provide a seamless experience between carriers. We are pleased to work with Verizon on this initiative.  We continue to work with others in the industry on similar collaborative arrangements and hope to see similar collaboration across the industry in the near future."

Verizon introduced its Advanced Calling 1.0 services across the United States in September, and will continue to make Advanced Calling-capable smartphones available to its customers, further expanding the reach of the technology.

AT&T introduced VoLTE services in its initial markets earlier this year, and will continue to expand to more devices and more markets across the United States.  


http://www.verizonwireless.com/news/article/2014/11/verizon-and-att-move-toward-voice-over-lte-volte-interoperability.html

Read More

Video: Why OPNFV?

Why OPNFV? Prodip Sen, CTO for Network Functions Virtualization at HP and Reino Tammela, Head of Nokia's Technology Center in Espoo, discuss the reasons for a new industry initiative outside of ETSI's ISG for NFV.

The new project aims to accelerate deployments. The jump-start does not aim to replace on-going standards development but to take a pragmatic approach to market demands.

http://youtu.be/XoOPhcSr4Z0

At the end of September, The Linux Foundation launched the Open Platform for NFV Project (OPNFV) with the goal of accelerating the commercial introduction of NFV products and services.

OPNFV will establish a carrier-grade, integrated, open source reference platform that industry peers will build together to advance the evolution of NFV and ensure consistency, performance and interoperability among multiple open source components. Because multiple open source NFV building blocks already exist, OPNFV will work with upstream projects to coordinate continuous integration and testing while filling development gaps.

The initial project objectives are to:

• develop an integrated and tested open source platform that can be used to investigate and demonstrate core NFV functionality;
• include proactive participation of leading end users to validate that OPNFV meets the needs of the end user community;
• contribute to and participate in relevant open source projects that will be leveraged in the OPNFV reference platform;
• establish an open ecosystem for NFV solutions based on open standards and open source software; and
• promote OPNFV as the preferred open reference platform.

While not developing standards, OPNFV will work closely with ETSI’s NFV ISG, among others, to drive consistent implementation of standards for an open NFV reference platform. When open source software development is aligned with standards development, it can root out issues early, identify resolutions and become the de facto codebase, resulting in a far more economical approach to platform development.

OPNFV will license new components under the Apache License Version 2.0 and will work within the licensing requirements of upstream projects in order to contribute code back to these projects. A Board of Directors and Technical Steering Committee (TSC) will govern the initiative. The Board will be made up of representatives from member companies and will set the business direction and scope of the project. The TSC will also provide technical governance and leadership for the project.

Board officers for OPNFV include:

• Prodip Sen, board chair  (HP)
• Margaret Chiosi, president (AT&T)
• Wenjing Chu, secretary (Dell)
• Hui Deng, treasurer (China Mobile)

Platinum founding members of IPNFV include AT&T, Brocade, China Mobile, Cisco, Dell, Ericsson, HP, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Juniper Networks, NEC, Nokia Networks, NTT DOCOMO, Red Hat, Telecom Italia and Vodafone. Silver-level founding members include 6WIND, Alcatel-Lucent, ARM, Broadcom, CableLabs, Cavium, CenturyLink, Ciena, Citrix, ClearPath Networks, ConteXtream, Coriant, Cyan, Dorado Software, Ixia, Metaswitch Networks, Mirantis, Orange, Sandvine, Sprint and Wind River.

A 21-page whitepaper on OPNFV is here:
https://www.opnfv.org//sites/opnfv/files/pages/files/opnfv_whitepaper_092914.pdf

Read More

Siaras' cloudScape Straddles Cloud/WAN Divide

Siaras, a start-up based in Silicon Valley and Burnaby, BC, unveiled its cloudScape software platform for enabling intercloud WAN connectivity by leveraging SDN WAN orchestration from a wide variety of equipment suppliers with direct, dedicated connectivity offerings available from many public cloud operators.

Siaras' cloudScape enables network service providers to integrated their own public or managed private cloud assets with third-party public clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, IBM SoftLayer, and others.  Specifically, cloudScape allows service providers to build “overclouds” with multiple heterogeneous data center and WAN “underclouds” provides the following functions:

1. Automatic orchestration of open intercloud WANs in response to real time needs between virtual data centers.
2. On demand intercloud WAN connectivity, or WAN-as-a-service (WANaaS), enabling connections to be spun up and torn down in a matter of minutes.
3. Traffic-engineering-as-a-service (TEaaS) allowing per-app, policy-based sharing of WAN connectivity.
4. Virtual points-of-presence (POPs) inside third-party public clouds facilitating the on-demand establishment of virtual data centers along with requisite WAN connectivity. This is especially important for cloud bursting, data base back up, and disaster recovery scenarios.

Working in partnership with KVH in Tokyo, Siaras recently completed a proof of concept that enables KVH enterprise customers are able to spin up workloads in multiple dissimilar data centers via a single cloud and WAN orchestration interface. The PoC, which utilized the Siaras cloudScape platform, enables KVH to substantially broaden the range of cloud services it offers

http://www.siaras.com/

• Siaras was founded in 2013 by Vivek Ragavan and Sig Luft.
• Siara Systems was a developer of metro area networking technology acquired by Redback Networks in 1999 in a deal valued at $4.3 billion in stock at the time. Vivek Ragavan was CEO of Siara Systems and Sig Luft was Director of Software Development.

Read More

Midokura Adopts Open Source Model for OpenStack Network Virtualization

Midokura has moved to an open source model for its MidoNet network virtualization solution designed for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds.

MidoNet is a highly distributed, de-centralized, multi-layer software-defined virtual network solution for the OpenStack Community. It replaces default OVS plugin from OpenStack deployments and offers a much more scalable and efficient networking solution for highly virtualized and cloud environments. MidoNet also provides L2-L4 services that are distributed at the network edge.

All of the code behind MidoNet is now available under the Apache 2.0 license, letting anyone in the popular and rapidly growing OpenStack community use, distribute and build on the technology, as well as submit back to the project. Midokura said it is committed to building a non-vendor driven community around the project and has dedicated resources to building and supporting a community of MidoNet users, including new staffing, a website and community infrastructure.

“We’ve been hard at work building our MidoNet solution for the past four years, well ahead of the competition,” said Dan Mihai Dumitriu, co-founder and CEO of Midokura. “The OpenStack Neutron community is quite fractured because multiple vendors are trying to sell proprietary solutions and thus have little incentive to invest in the default, which remains unfit for production. We decided to resolve the cognitive dissonance by open sourcing MidoNet, and making it a truly community driven project. We are giving the OpenStack community a stable, scalable, easy to deploy and fully open virtual networking solution.”

http://www.midokura.com/press-releases/midokura-open-sources-complete-iaas-network-virtualization-solution-openstack-community/

Read More

Akanda Debuts Open Source NFV Platform

Akanda, a start-up incubated with DreamHost since 2012, launched out of stealth mode to deliver an open source Network Function Virtualization (NFV) platform for cloud service providers.  The platform is already in use by 500+ tenants at Dreamhost and supporting 1,000s of VMs in its cloud compute service. DreamHost is now spinning-off the solution into Akanda, a start-up whose mission will be to accelerate open source NFV for cloud operators.

Akanda NFV implementation provides OpenStack integrated L3 network virtualization on a VMWare NSX L2 overlay. It interfaces with the OpenStack Neutron REST APIs and includes a sophisticated management and orchestration platform to monitor, configure, and manage virtualized routers. In the future, Akanda will be extended to virtualize additional network functions, including load balancing and firewalls, and will feature pluggable backends to alternative L2 overlays.

The company said intends to work collaboratively with all emerging open source communities and NFV projects including OpenStack Neutron, OPNFV and OpenDaylight.

DreamHost is providing $1.5 million in seed capital to Akanda. The team includes key former stakeholders in Inktank (now part of RedHat), the company that transformed the future of storage with the Ceph open source storage system. Henrik Rosendahl has been appointed Akanda's CEO. Simon Anderson, DreamHost’s CEO, will Chair the Akanda Board, and Jonathan LaCour, VP Cloud at DreamHost, will serve as a Director and technical advisor.

“Open Source is again proving to be the best way to tackle large, integrated software projects,” said Henrik Rosendahl, CEO of Akanda, Inc. “There is huge demand for open solutions up and down the networking software stack, and Akanda is well placed to garner new contributors and wider adoption given its roots as a core production-grade NFV platform at DreamHost.”

“DreamHost is excited to be co-founding and backing a new open source venture in Akanda,” said Simon Anderson, CEO of DreamHost. “We’ve been running Akanda in production with thousands of compute instances for over a year, and we’re confident the platform will be incredibly flexible and useful to cloud service providers worldwide as it develops and matures.”

http://www.akanda.io/

• DreamHost currently proudly hosts over 1.5 million websites, WordPress blogs, and applications.

Read More

Ruckus Wireless Posts Q3 Revenue of $85 Million, up 23% YoY

Ruckus Wireless posted third quarter 2014 revenue of $85.0 million, an increase of 23.3% from the third quarter of 2013. GAAP net income was $3.6 million for the third quarter of 2014, compared with $0.1 million for the third quarter of 2013. GAAP operating income was $6.1 million for the third quarter of 2014, compared with an operating loss of $0.5 million for the third quarter of 2013.

"Our enterprise and service provider business remained strong, fueled by rising demand for public Wi-Fi access in consumer facing enterprises and public venues. To drive long-term growth, corresponding with our long history of innovation, we introduced a new product line that expands our addressable market," said Selina Lo, president and chief executive officer, Ruckus Wireless. "We are also pleased with the progress we made in operating leverage, reporting record operating margins for the quarter."

http://www.ruckuswireless.com

Read More

Procera Posts Q3 Revenue of $16.1 Million

Procera reported Q3 2014 revenue of $16.1 million, compared with $21.3 million in the third quarter of 2013.  GAAP net loss for the third quarter of 2014 was $15.7 million, or $0.77 per diluted share, which includes a $12.4 million impairment charge to write-down the goodwill and purchased intangible assets related to an acquisition, and compared with a GAAP net loss of $3.0 million, or $0.15 per diluted share, for the third quarter of 2013.

"Our results for the quarter reflect our previously announced expectations, and although they are below our initial plans, we believe we have laid a solid technology and customer foundation to improve the financial fundamentals and drive shareholder value," said James Brear, president and chief executive officer of Procera Networks. "With the recent customer wins and successes in R&D, we are achieving our strategic goals in the areas of analytics and virtualization, and are focused on returning Procera to a long term growth trajectory."

http://www.proceranetworks.com/press-releases/procera-networks-announces-third-quarter-2014-financial-results

Read More