Overview

pATT (a href="http://www.att.com"www.att.com/a) is the world’s largest communications company by revenues, delivering advanced mobile services, next-generation TV, highspeed Internet and smart solutions for people and businesses. It is the largest provider of pay TV in the United States with 25 million linear video subscribers and its high-speed mobile internet network covers more than 400 million people in North America. It delivers advanced services to nearly 3.5 million businesses on six continents, representing 99 percent of the world’s economy. This includes nearly all of the Fortune 1000 as well as neighborhood businesses across the United States./p

Supernova Award Category

Tech Optimization and Modernization

The Problem

pOn an average business day ATT’s network carries 150 petabytes of data traffic, and these dramatic increases are not forecast to stop, or even slow, any time soon. The primary driver for this growth is video. In 2017, 60 percent of ATT's network traffic was video and they expected this to rise to 70-80 percent by 2020. For ATT this presents a huge technical challenge. Meanwhile, customer expectations are rising. As users are more and more dependent on communications services, they are increasingly powerless when they don’t have access to a given device or network at a given place or time. Accommodating this huge data growth while assuring reliable Quality of Service and the ultimate Quality of Experience is critical to ATT’s success. Also, businesses and consumers have a growing appetite for innovative services that are flexible enough to keep pace with ever-changing trends. ATT needs to be able to roll out these new services quickly and cost-effectively. Up until recently ATT kept up with rising customer and network demands by using increasingly sophisticated, complex routers, switches and other gear. But this was not feasible over the long-term./p

The Solution

pIn 2015 ATT embarked on an ambitious journey to transform its network infrastructure through NFV and SDN. They decided to take more of a top-down approach by building their scalability, flexibility and resilience in software built on top of standard (commercial off-the-shelf) Intel-based server hardware, which allows them to react faster and with greater agility to move capacity to where we need it most./p

The results

pDuring a 2018 earnings call, ATT CFO John Stephens said that the company was "beginning to see operating savings from our move to a software-defined network." In addition to these savings, new customer-facing offerings have been enabled, with features not available in ATT's legacy services. Business customers are now able to access flexible networking services more quickly and with greater control, supporting ATT’s vision of a self-service, user-defined network. For example, ATT FlexWare is a network of on-demand services that allows businesses to spin up systems and services like a firewall, router switch, load balancer or WAN accelerator where and when they need it. Using software, they can do this more quickly and efficiently. Previously, ordering, procuring, installing and connecting physical components would have taken much longer. Those are great benefits for the customer, but ATT also benefits from reduced supply chain, logistics and improved time to market for new services, while also laying the foundation for ATT to deploy a standards-based nationwide mobile 5G network in early 2020./p

Metrics

pATT set a goal to virtualize and software control 75 percent of its network infrastructure by 2020. During a 2018 earnings call, ATT CFO John Stephens said ATT was on track have virtualized 65 percent of its network by the end of the year. In 2019, PCMag recognized ATT as the Fastest and Most Reliable Mobile Network in the nation./p

The Technology

pATT has a long-standing, close relationship with Intel built around the move to next-generation infrastructure and services. The two have worked together on many projects including packet processing optimization and the development of ATT Universal Customer Premises Equipment* (uCPE*) – the hardware foundation of ATT FlexWare. Collaboration with Intel gives ATT early access to Intel technologies, allowing it to accelerate time to market./p

Disruptive Factor

pTogether Intel and ATT are developing reference architectures and designs that will set future industry standards, drive innovation and accelerate time to market so customers can benefit sooner. For example, ATT released into the community the code for its Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP), which it expects will become the open source standard for network building, just as Android* is for the smartphone. At first it was ATT and Intel working together to build ATT’s next-generation network. Now it’s ATT and Intel sharing the outcomes of our long collaboration more broadly throughout the industry allowing everyone to realize the benefits of NFV/p

Shining Moment

pOn March 27, 2018, The Linux Foundation announced the Disaggregated Network Operating System (DANOS) project to enable community collaboration across network hardware, forwarding and operating system layers. DANOS was initially based on ATT’s “dNOS” software framework of an open, cost-effective and flexible alternative to traditional networking operating systems./p