The new Open Standards: boon or barrier for telecoms?

Are traditional telecoms standards holding back innovation and deployments, or is there a better way they can co-exist with open source community project development? And how should CSPs take advantage of new opportunities created from stronger collaboration? At the DSP Leaders Forum, executives from both standards and open source communities debated the issues faced by both sides of the industry as it looks to strike the right balance between the two to the ultimate benefit of the service providers and their vendor partners.

The open source community wants to encourage an acceleration of the process, whilst the SDOs want to ensure industry-wide consensus. There are advantages and disadvantages to both goals. But as ETSI astutely notes, there will soon be a new generation of telecoms professionals who will expect to work in an agile and innovative way, which is why the organisation is currently conducting an extensive review of its engineering processes.

All the while, the industry is slowly realising that it is now part of a much larger application development ecosystem, where ride sharing firms like Lyft create sophisticated software code for their own purposes that actually have huge ramifications for the future of cloud native networking, such as the open source service mesh project Envoy. 

Change, it would appear, is inevitable.

Featuring:

• Adrian Scrase, Chief Technology Officer, ETSI
• Heather Kirksey, VP Community and Ecosystem Development, Linux Foundation Networking
• Chris Price, President, Ericsson Software Technology
• Attilio Zani, Executive Director, Telecom Infra Project