Keynote: Open Source, Open Standards & Open Vendors

### Overview In this keynote address, a representative from Verizon presents the telecommunications carrier's perspective on embracing open source, open standards, and disaggregated networking. While traditional carriers historically relied on proprietary vendor stacks and slow standards bodies, massive traffic growth, emerging low-latency use cases, and non-traditional market competition are driving telecommunications infrastructure toward virtualized, software-driven, and community-developed solutions.

### Key Topics - **Traffic Growth and Changing Patterns:** Traffic across wireline, wireless, and global IP networks continues to increase at 40% to 50% year-over-year, prior to the mainstream rollout of AR, VR, and AI. Furthermore, roughly 80% of IP traffic is generated by just five publishers (with wireline driven heavily by Netflix and wireless by YouTube), fundamentally shifting traffic management from traditional north-south transit to east-west peering. - **Network Disaggregation and Virtualization:** Moving away from monolithic, centralized control, the carrier architecture is evolving toward distributed edge clouds, SDN (Software-Defined Networking), and NFV (Network Functions Virtualization), with compute and packet core software extending all the way to localized infrastructure such as light poles. - **Motivations for Adopting Open Source:** Verizon identifies scale, resiliency, and significantly reduced cycle times as primary motivations. Unlike formal standards bodies, open-source communities allow rapid development from code to production deployment, shared multi-party automation, and broader ecosystem support. - **Adoption Hurdles and Vendor Challenges:** Hesitations remain around open-source fragmentation (e.g., competing management/orchestration initiatives like OSM vs. ONAP), projects backed by only a single vendor masquerading as open source, and the heavy integration burden created by disaggregation.

### Technical Details - **Edge and Dynamic Infrastructure:** Emerging workloads like autonomous vehicles and augmented reality demand network management beyond simple bandwidth allocation, requiring strict latency controls and dynamic network slicing that can be stood up and torn down at the edge on demand. - **Integration and Packaging:** The speaker highlights an industry friction point where vendors wrap OpenStack with proprietary software layers, inhibiting interoperability with other vendor components. Verizon requests that vendors innovate on applications while committing to standardized, open community integration models.

### Takeaways - **Harmonization Across Projects:** Open-source bodies need increased dialogue and integration coordination rather than fracturing into isolated efforts. - **Focus on Higher-Layer Deployability:** While lower infrastructure layers like OpenStack are actively deployed at scale in production carrier networks, higher software-defined network layers require mature, proven, multi-vendor deployable solutions.