Edgecore Networks offers ASXvOLT16 whitebox PON OLT design to Open Compute Project

Oct. 10, 2017

Edgecore Networks, a wholly owned subsidiary of Accton Technology Corp., says it has contributed the hardware design package for its ASXvOLT16, a disaggregated 10G PON optical line terminal (OLT), to the Open Compute Project (OCP) Foundation. The company sees the whitebox OLT has playing in applications of Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter and access network architectures of a similar bent.

Edgecore Networks, a wholly owned subsidiary of Accton Technology Corp., says it has contributed the hardware design package for its ASXvOLT16, a disaggregated 10G PON optical line terminal (OLT), to the Open Compute Project (OCP) Foundation. The company sees the whitebox OLT has playing in applications of Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter (CORD; see "ON.Lab, The Linux Foundation establish CORD as formal project") and access network architectures of a similar bent.

Based on Broadcom StrataDNX switch and PON MAC SoC merchant silicon, the ASXvOLT16 design supports 16 XFP ports for either XGS-PON or NG-PON2 applications as well as four 100-Gigabit Ethernet QSFP28 uplinks. Edgecore says the design conforms to the AT&T Open XGS-PON 1RU OLT specification the service provider contributed to the OCP Telco Project. AT&T has announced its intention to trail XGS-PON using open systems (see "AT&T plans field trial of open system, cloud-based XGS-PON"). The service provider also just released its Virtual Optical Line Termination Hardware Abstraction (VOLTHA) 1.0 open access software platform into the Open Networking Foundation (ONF). Edgecore says the ASXvOLT16 supports the use of VOLTHA as well (see "AT&T releases VOLTHA to ONF for XGS-PON software-defined access").

"Edgecore has made important contributions to OCP, including 15 hardware design contributions to the OCP Networking Project of data center switches, modular network platforms, Wi-Fi access points, PoE access switches and service provider edge switches," said Bill Carter, CTO of the Open Compute Project Foundation, via an Edgecore press release. "We welcome Edgecore's new contribution of the 10G PON OLT design to the Telco Project, especially as its conformance to the spec previously contributed by AT&T demonstrates the collaboration among OCP members that accelerates the availability of open infrastructures for new use cases."

"As the ONF leads the development of open software solutions to enable CORD deployments, we see increasing interest from service providers worldwide in disaggregated hardware for PON service delivery from Residential CORD environments," added Guru Parulkar, executive director of the ONF via the same release. "The ONF welcomes Edgecore's contribution of its ASXvOLT16 OLT design to the open community, which not only provides a disaggregated 10G PON OLT in conformance to the CORD architecture but also assures service providers of a completely open hardware design."

Edgecore says the ASXvOLT16 product is available now for proof-of-concept testing and trials, with general availability in Q4 2017.

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