What is CORD?

One of the most predominant use cases we see of  NFV and SDN adoption is CORD, Central office Re-Architected as a Datacenter. It combines NFV, SDN, and the elasticity of commodity clouds to bring datacenter economics and cloud agility to the Telco Central Office. CORD lets the operator manage their Central Offices using declarative modeling languages for agile, real-time configuration of new customer services. Major service providers like AT&T, SK Telecom, Verizon, China Unicom and NTT Communications are already supporting CORD.

 Before we get deeper into CORD, let's make sure we are all on the same page regarding what is a Telco Central Office. 
COs are:

  • It is a service provider's gateway to its customers. 
  • There are dozens of thousands of COs.
  • CO provides a great vantage point for service providers
    • Allowing enablement of new services
  • One CO has three main markets (residential, mobile and enterprise) and each may support
    • 10K+ Residential subscribers
    • 10K+ Mobile Subscribers
    • 1K+ Enterprise Customers




In order to create a complete solution, ready for evaluation, and to be able to have a common platform capable of delivering a wide range of innovative services, while encouraging open source, pulling resources and setting up new standards, the OpenCord organization was created. 
In its own words "Our mission is to bring datacenter economies and cloud agility to service providers for their residential, enterprise, and mobile customers using an open reference implementation of CORD with an active participation of the community. The reference implementation of CORD will be built from commodity servers, white-box switches, disaggregated access technologies (e.g., vOLT, vBBU, vDOCSIS), and open source software (e.g., OpenStack, ONOS, XOS)"

What were the challenges of COs that lead to this initiative?

  • Source of high Cappex and Opex
  • Lack of Programmability inhibits innovation
  • Closed systems (not multi-vendor) proprietary don't communicate well with others systems, limiting innovation, new competitors and new services


This is just one of the use cases, I will write a second part to this post where I will cover other different kind of POCs, like vCPE, vOLT, vCDN, etc...
Location: Plano, TX, USA

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