AT&T Likes That the ONF Brings Original Design Manufacturers to the Table

AT&T is at 63 percent of its goal to bring 75 percent of its networks under SDN control by 2020, according to AT&T CTO Andre Fuetsch. Speaking with SDxCentral, Fuetsch said, “63 percent represents how we’ve enabled our networking capabilities. Now, we’re in the process of migrating our traffic to take advantage of those capabilities.” He said that the migration of traffic will be correlated with how many of AT&T’s customers move to 5G. Reflecting on the company’s virtualization progress to date, Fuetsch said, “Part of this journey was a learning experience to find out what works well and what doesn’t. We found even with our own internal clouds we made a lot of changes because some of our internal assumptions weren’t right.” He added that the company has learned to “fail fast and recover quickly.” Aside from being CTO at AT&T, Fuetsch also wears another hat: chairman of the board of directors for the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), which is holding an event December 4-6, in Santa Clara, California.