Major telcos including Verizon and AT&T join Facebook's Open Compute Project, in a challenge to network vendors like Cisco and Juniper
James Niccolai / PCWorld :
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook's Open Compute Project had already become a major force in data center hardware, drawing hundreds of companies from HP to Goldman Sachs around open server designs. With Verizon and AT&T signing on, the same playbook is being pointed at the network itself — the routers and switches carriers buy today are largely locked to proprietary stacks from Cisco and Juniper.
The timing matters: weeks after this story, Facebook launched the Telecom Infra Project with Intel and Nokia as founding members, an explicit attempt to do for telecom equipment what OCP did for servers. Google's own decision to join OCP shortly after shows the hyperscalers converging on open infrastructure as a shared front.
First-order effects
- Cisco and Juniper's largest carrier customers — Verizon and AT&T — are now inside the room where competing open network specifications get written, turning them from pure buyers into co-designers of the gear they procure.
Second-order effects
- The launch of the Telecom Infra Project gives the effort a dedicated vehicle beyond data centers, pulling Nokia and Intel into an open coalition and forcing incumbent network vendors to decide whether to contribute specs or defend closed ones.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the telecom equipment market disaggregates the way server hardware did under OCP: hardware becomes commodity white boxes sourced from ODMs while value migrates to software and integration — a shift whose pace depends on whether carriers actually deploy open gear at scale.
The trend: Carrier networking is following data center hardware down the open-specification path, with hyperscaler-led projects like OCP and the Telecom Infra Project converting the biggest telcos from captive customers of Cisco and Juniper into spec-setting participants.