Lumina Networks, a spin-off company focused on the open source, software-defined networking sector, said it has closed a $10 million Series A round that included $8 million in new funding led by Verizon Ventures.

AT&T and Rahi Systems are new investors that participated in the round, the company said.

Lumina Networks, spun-off from Brocade in August 2017, said it will use the funds for new product development centered on its OpenDaylight-powered SDN controller, and to spur expansions into Europe and Japan.

Lumina, which is focused on a market that aims to move away from proprietary purpose-built networking hardware to off-the-shelf hardware driven by software, said the A round comes after network operator deployments in the first nine months of operations, with revenues more than double their pre-spin-off levels.

"This investment by both Verizon and AT&T demonstrates the strategic importance of open source networking to the automation and digitization of their networks," Andrew Coward, founder and CEO of Lumina Networks, said in a statement. "We understand the value of our mission to take open source networking out of the labs of our customers and into production deployment. This funding will enable us to reach a wider customer base and realize the industry vision of easily deployable open source software-defined networking (SDN)."

Open source is “instrumental to Verizon’s digital transformation,” added Alexander Khalin, director of Verizon Ventures.

"SDN is at the heart of our network transformation, and we've committed to virtualizing and software-controlling 75% of our core network functions by 2020," added Chris Rice, SVP of AT&T Labs, Domain 2.0 Architecture and Design. 

With twosessions dedicated to it here today at INTX, network virtualization is a hot topic for service providers and their array of vendors.

Kyrio, the recently rebranded CableLabs for-profit spin-off, has also been taking aim at network functions virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networks (SDN) in the form a new interoperability lab based at the organization’s Louisville, Colo., and Sunnyvale, Calif., facilities.

Multichannel News recently caught up with Phil McKinney, CEO of CableLabs, and Mitch Ashley, president and general manager of Kyrio, to learn more about Kyrio and the aims and plans for the new lab and why they think it will be important not just to cable, but to other industries as well.

Multichannel News: In February you rebranded your for-profit NetworkFX subsidiary as Kyrio as it pursued areas like wireless roaming and WiFi testing.  And recently you announced that it will open an SDN]/NFV interoperability lab. Can you offer a bit more detail on the goals of that new effort?

Mitch Ashley: Kyrio is a wholly owned subsidiary of CableLabs and what we're doing is building off the phenomenal technology transfer model that CableLabs has had for the cable industry of creating technologies and innovations that show up in vendor products and show up in cable operator networks and in customer homes. 

NetworkFX (the former brand of the Kyrio spin-off) was started originally around taking the PKI (public key infrastructure) service that CableLabs had done for the entire cable industry -- coming up on over 500 million security keys for devices like cable modems, CableCARDs... That sort of proved out the model for Kyrio. In January we announced the rebranding of the company but also that we were expanding into other lines of business, like wireless testing. 

[For the NFV/SDN lab], we're providing a vendor-neutral laboratory environment where hardware manufacturers, software providers and even chip manufacturers can come in. Much like we do with cable modems and other technologies, now we can interoperable with each other and go through test deployment scenarios, do basic testing across devices in a friendly environment where they know that the confidentiality of their information is maintained. What we focused on was how do we help those vendors get their products to market in a mutli-vendor environment. 

It's pretty difficult for one manufacture to get the bevy of SDN and NFV devices into their labs to do testing with. We provide that platform, where they can maintain an ongoing presence in our interop lab or do some remote testing. And we'll do hosted events -- like the OPNFV interop...on May 9. 

We can also provide remote access to both hardware and software manufacturers and provide new builds and loads onto their equipment and test that across multiple hardware manufacturers and software solutions.

Phil McKinney:  The SDN and NFV worlds are moving fast. We see it having a great opportunity to have an impact on the MSOs but the overall cost of network infrastructure and encourage the vendors to...move quickly. That's why we brought that expertise and opened it up to anybody and everybody not related or tied to cable operators.

MCN: Will there be a qualification stamp that comes out of this like CableLabs does with DOCSIS? 

PM: Even on the cable side when we do an interop, there's no certification or stamp. Anything that happens inside the interop, stays inside the interop. But there are still some gaps in the NFV world around interoperability. They can get access to a set of configurations that they wouldn't be able to afford on their own in order to do a better job of bringing the entire industry together. The focus, step one, is just on interoperability.

MCN: How would you characterize the cable industry's work with SDN and NFV with respect to competing industries? Are they in lock-step, ahead of the curve, behind the pack? 

PM: I can tell you that most of the major MSOs are keenly interested in taking advantage of the SDN and NFV worlds. The main driver there is can you speed up the process of deploying new products and new services.

The bigger operators are very involved in SDN and NFV; they are all having discussions with their vendor suppliers. Many of them have their own labs set up. Some are doing deployments...but it's in the early days. That's why I think there's so much excitement about the interop labs.

In this case, we're trying to bring everyone along together and it actually shortens the timeframe of going from, this is a nice concept, one in which I can actually commercially deploy this in a broad-based format. 

A far-reaching technology and business relationship forged by Ericsson and Cisco Systems will focus on next-gen networks and wired/wireless convergence and virtualization, but it also spells trouble for several of their networking rivals.

“[W]e think this news bodes negatively for competitors and partners, including Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia, Juniper and Ciena,” Raymond James analyst Simon Leopold said in a research note issued Monday in the wake of the Ericsson-Cisco agreement.

Investors seem to agree, at least with respect to Juniper, whose shares were down 7.88% in mid-day trading Monday. Feeling less of the brunt was Ciena (down 1.85%), Alcatel-Lucent (down 0.86%), and Nokia (down 1.46%). Ericsson shares were up 1.35%, and Cisco’s were down 1.09%.

Leopold said the new relationship makes business sense for Ericsson-Cisco, in some of the same ways it does for the pending merger between Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia.

“Both companies (Cisco and Ericsson) bring intellectual property and R&D to the table,” Leopold said. “ Cisco's greatest strengths lie in software, switching and routing, along with its powerful enterprise channel, and Ericsson brings strength in wireless, services, and telco network management."

While he is optimistic about the partnership, which ties together similar challenges and objectives, Leopold warned that many such arrangements have not panned out. Juniper and Ericsson have been partnered up for several years, but have “suffered after Ericsson acquired Redback,” he pointed out.

On a call Monday to discuss the deal in more detail, top execs with Cisco and Ericsson highlighted the incremental growth opportunities it presents, and focused less on how the agreement will impact existing partnerships with other vendors.

Ericsson and Cisco have been in discussions about the deal for about 13 months, with a “significant acceleration” in those talks in the last six months, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said, noting that Ericsson’s service reach (65,000 people in that group) complements Cisco’s much smaller 11,000.  “It’s very much about looking out ahead of what’s in the markets and dramatic transformation of networks and IT.”

“This is a big bet for both of us,” added Ericsson president and CEO Hans Vestberg.

Both Vestberg and Robbins will have management oversight of the partnership, which aims to create an additional $1 billion in incremental for each company by 2018.

Why not just merge the companies? Robbins said partnership was the best way to accelerate the goals that the companies can bring to the table with their respective products and technologies.

“We think that this brings the innovation from both sides and allows us to move now. It allows us to absolutely deliver solutions to our customer immediately”

Vestberg agreed that Ericsson had options to build, buy or partner to fulfill its longer-term missions, “and partner was the only way forward in order to make it efficient.”

“We believe this is the right move for us, right now,” Robbins added.

Vestberg said Ericsson’s existing vendor partnerships will remain intact, and views the Cisco deal as a growth opportunity that will also enable the company to broaden its portfolio.

Representing the next step in the evolution of DOCSIS-powered cable broadband networks, CableLabs recently released a new family of specs that cover a range of “distributed” architectures for the Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP), a high-density system that combines the functions of the cable modem termination system and the edge QAM and will play a key role in the industry’s all-IP transition.

The new distributed architectures, which expand on today’s more centralized deployments,  will provide “significant scale advantages and flexible deployment options supporting…both DOCSIS 3.0 and DOCSIS 3.1 networks,” Karthik Sundaresan, a principal architect at CableLabs, explained in this blog post about the new specifications, which aim to facilitate multi-vendor interoperability.

The distributed approach, Sundaresan wrote, fits with the software-defined networking (SDN) and networks functions virtualization (NFV) initiatives operators are pursuing, and will run parallel to a wide range of wireless infrastructure architectures.

He noted that distributed DOCSIS deployments are already underway in some markets that use  C-DOCSIS, a modified approach that was originally developed for China’s cable market that has since been formally integrated with CableLabs’s broader DOCSIS initiatives.

CableLabs, Sundaresan explained, is specifying several different Distributed CCAP Architectures (including Remote PHY and Remote MAC-PHY) and will release the set of technical reports and specifications throughout this summer.

The specs will apply to DOCSIS and CCAP vendors such as Arris, Cisco Systems, Casa Systems, Harmonic and Huawei, as well as Gainspeed, a startup that is developing a “virtual” CCAP.

CableLabs issued the Remote PHY family of specifications last month (the technology is covered via six specs and one technical report describing the overall architecture). Labeled as “MHAv2,’ they represent an evolution of the original Modular Headend Architecture specifications.

Remote PHY  paves the way for an integrated CCAP to be separated into two components -- the CCAP Core and the Remote PHY Device (RPD) – along with an interface that weaves them together using “pseudowires.”  

A common location for an RPD, which contains elements such as the downstream QAM and OFDM modulators, upstream QAM and OFDM demodulators, is the optical node, located at the junction of the fiber and coax plants, Sundaresan wrote.

Sundaresan said vendors have begun architecting ASIC designs, device platforms and software to implement the RPD and CCAP-Core devices. The specs for the OSS that will manage the devices are under development and will be released this summer.

Comcast has become the first service provider to join the OpenDaylight Project, an open source platform for software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) technologies aimed at building more automation and programmability into the network.

OpenDaylight also announced that Lenovo has become a member of the initiative.

“We have been testing ODL since the project launched to see where it might fit in and have been impressed by the improvements in functionality and stability with each successive release,” Chris Luke, senior principal engineer at Comcast, noted in this blog post about the MSO’s involvement. “We have also been participating with our partner CableLabs on the OpenDaylight sub-project PacketCable PCMM, which aims to develop a southbound plugin for ODL that can manage service flows across Cable Modem Termination System (CMTS) devices.”

“With an ever-growing number of endpoints to manage, evolving our SDN and NFV capabilities becomes increasingly important,” said Rakesh Puri, executive director of network applications and systems at Comcast, in a separate statement.

Comcast, Luke emphasized in the blog, is motivated to reduce the operational complexity of its networks, noting that the near-term work involves making improvements to network automation under the operator’s Programmable Network Platform, a framework that outlines a stack of behaviors and abstraction layers that software uses to interact with the network.

“It is our hope that by harmonizing on a common framework and useful abstractions, more application groups within the company will be able to make use of better intelligence and more easily interact with the network,” noted Luke, who is also part of an OpenDaylight Advisory Group formed to provide technical and strategic guidance to the ODL community on the challenges of running real-world networks. “Longer term, we’re working toward creating an architecture where the core of the network is not intimately involved in the operation of virtual networks.” 

Software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) – technologies that are playing an important role in the evolution of telco networks and rapidly becoming a point of emphasis for cable, is going to be a huge business, according to a new forecast from Infonetics Research.

The carrier market for SDN and NFV will reach $11 billion by 2018, Infonetics said in a report that takes a deep dive on SDN router and switch hardware and software and NFV-facing elements, such as policy, deep packet inspection, and security.

"For three years, the telecom industry has been abuzz over SDN and NFV, with anticipation and hard work developing the vision, goals, architectures, use cases, proof-of-concept projects, field trials, and even some commercial deployments. We've been gathering data in this early market for nearly two years and are projecting the global service provider SDN and NFV market to reach $11 billion in 2018,"  Michael Howard, Infonetics Research's co-founder and principal analyst for carrier networks, said in a statement.

Infonetics is breaking down spending in the emerging market into new SDN and NFV software, which it expects to comprise 20% of the total SDN and NFV market in 2018, as well as “displaced” revenue (12% by 2018) that comes from purchases other than traditional network hardware such as routers and firewalls. The third revenue segment – predicted to be the largest (68% by 2018) will come from “newly identified segments of existing markets,” which mostly includes virtualized network functions (VNFs), as well as ports on routers, switches, and optical gear that have become SDN-capable.

The cable industry will have a front row seat as The Linux Foundation moves forward on the Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) project, an initiative involving a large group of carrier and vendors that aims to build a common, interoperable platform that can accelerate the network functions virtualization marketplace.

CableLabs is a founding member of OPNFV and Chris Donley, CableLabs’ director of advanced networks and applications, will serve on the OPNFV board, according to this blog post by CableLabs principal architect Don Clarke.

Virtualization is becoming a big focus for telecom and, by extension, for the cable industry, which is mulling the best way forward on a virtual form of the converged cable access platform (CCAP), a high-density, energy-saving access architecture that packs in the functions of the cable modem termination system and the edge QAM.

Donley told Multichannel News earlier this year that CableLabs had begun to investigate how a virtual CCAP would look like, noting that such work was still in the “relatively early stages,” and stemmed from CableLabs’ study of the advantages promised by software-defined networking and NFV, which creates a path to putting into software and off-the-shelf servers many functions that have historically been packed into purpose-built hardware.

“OPNFV will create a reference platform where performance and interoperability of open source NFV solutions will be validated. As one of those involved in the early discussions that led to the creation of OPNFV, I am extremely pleased that we have been able to help bring into existence this new forum,” Clarke wrote, adding that CableLabs hosted the inception meeting for OPNFV at the organization’s Sunnyvale location  in June. “For the first time network designers will not be limited by the constraints of fixed hardware to design their networks.”

He added that an open source approach will allow for specs and implementation to “occur simultaneously,” speed up the overall process.

Clarke, who joined CableLabs in May, also shed some light on CableLabs' progress on the vCCAP front, noting that the R&D house has developed a CMTS plug-in for OpenDaylight, an open source SDN controller, that was used by several vendors to show off SDN/NFV implementations at last week’s SCTE Cable-Tec Expo in Denver. Clarke said the CMTS plug-in has been incorporated into the OpenDaylight “Helium” release.

The Linux Foundation on Tuesday announced the following members of OPNFV:

Platinum Members: AT&T, Brocade, China Mobile, Cisco, Dell, Ericsson, HP, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Juniper Networks, NEC, Nokia Networks, NTT DOCOMO, Red Hat, Telecom Italia and Vodafone.

Sliver-Level Founding Members: 6WIND, Alcatel-Lucent, ARM, Broadcom, CableLabs, Cavium, CenturyLink, Ciena, Citrix, ClearPath Networks, ConteXtream, Coriant, Cyan, Dorado Software, Ixia, Metaswitch Networks, Mirantis, Orange, Sandvine, Sprint and Wind River.

According to The Linux Foundation, OPNFV “will establish a carrier-grade, integrated, open source reference platform that industry peers will build together to advance the evolution of NFV and ensure consistency, performance and interoperability among multiple open source components.”

Noting that multiple open source NFV “building blocks” existing already, OPNFV will seek to coordinate continuous integration and testing while filling development gaps.

The initial scope of OPNFV will be on building NFV infrastructure (NFVI) and Virtualized Infrastructure Management (VIM) leveraging existing open source components where possible. OPNFV will also license new components under the Apache License Version 2.0 and will work within the licensing requirements of upstream projects in order to contribute code back to these projects.

Board officers for OPNFV include Prodip Sen, board chair (HP); Margaret Chiosi, president (AT&T); Wenjing Chu, secretary (Dell); and Hui Deng, treasurer (China Mobile).

This year’s Cable-Tec Expo in the Mile High City will be flush with big picture-focused opening sessions and drill-it-down engineering workshops that will cover the gamut when it comes to what is important in the here-and-now and what’s on the horizon, but coming up fast.

That means the show will be covering everything from cable’s Internet-protocol video migration, the emergence of DOCSIS 3.1, the industry’s evolving WiFi strategies, cable’s energy-management initiatives, making sense of the so-called “Internet of Things,” and everything in between.

Unless you have a time machine tucked away in your back pocket, it’ll be impossible to be everywhere at once and not miss any of the important technology beats. We’ve spent some time poring over what’s on tap in Denver and have boiled down some of the sessions and workshops that will be on our hit list.

DOCSIS 3.1

There’s plenty from which to choose from on DOCSIS 3.1, the budding platform that is promising to deliver wide-scale multi-gigabit capacities without having to pull fiber all the way to the premises.

There will be plenty of nuts and bolts to chew on Monday (Sept. 22) during the pre-show DOCSIS 3.1 and Wireless symposium, but this one is shaping up to be an important, sure-fire hit:

1 p.m-1:30 p.m.: “DOCSIS 3.1 Current Status and Schedule,” with Jorge Salinger of Comcast Cable; and Belal Hamzeh of CableLabs.

Other DOCSIS 3.1-facing sessions on the dance card:

Tuesday, Sept. 23 at 9:45 a.m.: “Peeling Back the Layers of DOCSIS 3.1” (Room 108), moderated by Ralph Brown of CableLabs, with Richard Prodan of Broadcom, and Ayham Al-Banna of Arris.

Wednesday, Sept. 24 at 10:45 a.m.: “DOCSIS 3.1: Making It Real” (Room 108), moderated by Jorge Salinger of Comcast, with Dan Torbet of Arris, and Patricio Latini of Intraway.

And, putting aside the D3.1 future for a moment, let’s not forget about cable’s skinny upstream. This session promises to show how the industry is going to help the upstream pack on a few necessary pounds:

Thursday, Sept. 25 at 12:45 p.m. (Room 108): “Expanding The DOCSIS Upstream” (Room 108), moderated by George Hart of Rogers Communications, with John (Jack) Moran III Futurewei Technologies (Huawei), and Paul Brooks of Time Warner Cable.

WiFi

In the home or out on the network, WiFi is rapidly becoming a key weapon in cable’s arsenal. But it’s not all about feeds and speeds. Here are some sessions that will hit several of the bases:

Monday, Sept. 22 at 9:15 a.m. (Symposium): “Carrier Grade WiFi,” with Mark Poletti, CableLabs.

Monday, Sept. 22 at 10:45 a.m. (Symposium): “Community WiFi,” with Vivek Ganti, CableLabs.

Thursday, Sept. 25 at 12:45 p.m. (Room 102): “WiFi: The Quest dor Quality” (Room 102), moderated by Raymond Celona of Comcast, with Todd Smith of Comcast and Charles Cheevers of Arris.

Thursday, Sept. 25 at 2 p.m. (Room 102): “WiFi In The Connected Home,” moderated by Chris Albano of Comcast, with Chris Cholas of TWC and John Anderson of Fluke Networks.

Making Sense of SDN, NFV and the Internet of Things

Software-defined networking and network functional virtualization are keys to the future of telecom networks, but what are the benefits and potential pitfalls, and how is cable poised to take advantage of these trends. And why does cable care about the Internet of Things? These sessions will provide some answers:

Monday, Sept. 22 at 2 p.m. (Room 201): “Application of SDN and NFV in the Service Provider Delivery Network,” moderated by Bruce McClelland of Arris, with Adam Dunstan of Active Broadband Networks, and Alon Bernstein of Cisco Systems.

Tuesday, Sept. 23 at 9:45 a.m. (Room 102): “Cable’s Internet of Everything,”moderated by Mark Francisco of Comcast, with Mark Tubinis of Savant Systems.

Putting RDK And DevOps In The Picture

This year’s event is placing an emphasis on the “DevOps” model and the Reference Design Kit (RDK) for IP-capable devices. This session will mash them together:

Wednesday, Sept. 24 at 10:45 a.m.: “Putting DevOps Into Practice: The RDK Model” (Room 201), Moderated by Leslie Ellis of Ellis Edits, a Multichannel News contributor, with Labeeb Ismail of Comcast, Bill Warga of Liberty Global and Matt Zelesko of TWC.

Wednesday, Sept. 24

Ultra HD/4K

Sure, we’re still in the hype-filled days of 4K as set prices are still high and there’s not much content available in the format yet, but there are indications that Ultra HD is poised to become a hot format, rather than another flame-out that will remind everyone of 3DTV.

Tuesday, Sept. 23 at 11 a.m. (Room 203): “Ultra HD, HEVC and HDR Video From The Programmers’ Perspective,”moderated by Gregg Grigaitis of Suddenlink Communications, with Kirk Baker of Technicolor and Satoru Wajiki of the Japan Cable and Telecommunications Association.

The Big Picture

While workshops take a mind-melting, deep dive into key engineering topics, it’s still good to take a step back and try to see forest from the trees. For that, don’t miss the general sessions, and a special one assembled for cable’s ambitious energy management initiatives. 

Tuesday, Sept 23 at 8 a.m.  (Bellco Theater), following a keynote from Cisco’s Rob Lloyd, we’ll put our heads into the “cloud” to hear the forecast on apps and infrastructure with moderator Tony Werner of Comcast (and this year’s program committee chair), and Mark Muehl of Comcast, Geoff Arnold of Cisco, and Nick Barcet of eNovance/Red Hat.

Wednesday, Sept. 24 at 8 a.m. (Bellco Theater), and speaking of big picture, here’s one that will offer a global-sized snapshot, as Werner talks tech (and ops) Mike Fries, president and CEO of Liberty Global.

Wednesday, Sept. 24 at 1 p.m. (Room 103): “Energy 2020”: Comcast’s John Schanz (keynoter), with session moderator Theresa Hennesy of Comcast, Ivan Lamoureux of Suddenlink Communications, Simpson Cumba of Comcast, Derek DiGiacomo of SCTE, John Dolan of Rogers Communications, and Dan Cooper of TWC.