For at least the last 20 years, telecom service providers have been trying to break free of the proprietary interfaces that connect core network equipment — particularly switches and enhanced service platforms — to create a more open network that uses multi-vendor technology and enables faster service development.

Past efforts to achieve this goal have bogged down in the quagmire of legacy gear that is the public network. Equipment manufacturers had no incentive to change while profiting from a captive audience. Service providers found that the transition from what had worked well, if expensively, wasn't clear cut and often required leaps of faith with potentially punishing consequences.

A new effort is capitalizing on the move to all-IP networks and the fact that, as Moore's Law plays out in the computer world, it is now much more cost-effective to make off-the-shelf processors and components that live up to the reliability needs of the public telecom network.

The Open Communications Architecture Forum, or OCAF, is leading this new effort to define a comprehensive set of commercially available off-the-shelf components that can be combined in a variety of ways to create the network solutions telecom service providers need, said Doug Dreyer, the IBM executive who chairs OCAF. The forum will announce a major development this week with its new Carrier Grade Open Environment framework.

“OCAF's goal is to create a common open framework that supports the next generation of telecom services, but does it with economies of scale familiar in the IT world,” Dreyer said. The group is also defining commercial off-the-shelf building blocks for services.

IBM is one of 11 founding members of OCAF, which includes three service providers (Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom and Telecom Italia), one U.S. service provider (Comcast) and one Japanese service provider (NTT). Other founding members are Avaya, Cisco Systems, Lucent Technologies, Nortel Networks and Siemens. Since its founding in 2003, the OCAF has signed 14 additional members, including Sun Microsystems, Sprint and BellSouth and has set up a liaison relationship with Hewlett-Packard and Motorola of the Service Availability Forum.

The group believes it can substantially lower the cost of public network systems and speed service deployment.

“If you looked at what a server would cost in the standard enterprise world and looked at some functionality in the telco central office, most of the time you would see a 200 to 400 percent cost difference,” said Bruce Anthony, chief technology officer of telecom servers, systems and technology for IBM.

One of the reasons this effort has a better chance is the existence of Linux as a true open computing standard, Dreyer said. In the past, telecom relied on Unix servers, which came in many versions.

The presence of Alcatel, Ericsson, Lucent, Nokia, Nortel and Siemens, among others, within the OCAF speaks to these companies' recognition that they can do business better in an open environment, said Max Bornschlegl, Siemens' vice president of systems engineering management systems.

“The necessity to set up our own hardware and software solutions for the special market was always driven because there was not enough components available,” he said. “Therefore, such a open framework will accelerate so that we are more cost-efficient with our solutions and faster to market.”