The traditional central office  network, like the rest of the legacy telco network, imposes tough challenges on  service providers: operational inefficiency, high maintenance costs, and little  opportunity to offer user-centric services.

CORD, developed by ON.Lab in  collaboration with a global community of partners, intends to address this  challenge.

CORD transforms the traditional central office by capitalizing on the benefits of NFV, SDN, and open source software to bring innovative services to customers.

ON.Lab’s partners for the CORD  project include Tier 1 network operators, as well as industry-leading vendors like Ciena. Since CORD was unveiled in 2015, it has experienced significant momentum and adoption among service providers actively collaborating and accelerating its development for use in their production networks.

CORD capitalizes on the benefits of Software-Defined Networking (SDN), Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), and cloud open-source software and uses commoditized hardware building blocks to bring the economics and agility of a cloud data center to the service provider central office. Importantly, residential, enterprise, and mobile customers benefit from services that are delivered faster and more efficiently than ever before.

Blue Planet’s Role

CORD is one of the primary use  cases for the Open Network Operating System (ONOS), an open-source SDN controller for service providers and other  mission-critical networks. It is enabled by a hardened, commercial-grade  version of the ONOS—Blue Planet ONOS (BP ONOS)—along with Blue Planet’s multi-domain  and NFV service orchestration solutions to control and orchestrate white  box-based switching fabrics at the central office.

By using Blue Planet, CORD is  backed by Ciena’s world-class software service, support, and development resources.  CORD also takes advantage of Ciena’s significant cumulative software expertise working  with the open-source community.