Central to the booming Dallas-Ft. Worth technology sector metroplex is what’s known as Telecom Corridor, ground zero for a number of telecommunications industry giants in and around Richardson, TX. AT&T, Verizon, Ericsson, Samsung, Texas Instruments, and MetroPCS, to name a few, all have a major presence here. The role that the telecom central office will play in the near-future, next-generation of mobile, IoT and cloud services cannot be underestimated.

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“It’s no secret that the telecom industry shares a common mission-critical-facilities genealogy with the data center,” said Bruce Taylor, DCD Colo+Cloud conference chair, “but now both IT and telecom sectors are hell-bent on seeing that legacy heritage take on a whole new set of at-the-edge capabilities, ready for the forecasted explosive growth in IP network data traffic.

The Telco Project engineering workshop takes place the day prior to the full DCD Colo+Cloud Conference on Monday, Sept. 26 at the Intercontinental Dallas. This all-day workshop is intended for infrastructure technical professionals wishing to gain a grounding how this OCP project is quickly “bringing OCP innovations to the telco data center infrastructure that (will result in) increased cost-savings and agility,” said Jason Taylor, OCP president and chair, and infrastructure foundation VP at Facebook. The Telco Project is an initiative to assist in bringing open-source adoption to hardware and software within the telecom ecosystem.

Central office upgrades essential to telco survival

“While we’re supportive of all OCP initiatives,” says DCD Co-founder Dan Scarborough, “this one is of acute importance because of the role telecom central office should and will play in the anticipated mammoth expansion of internet-and-cloud-driven network demand.”

AT&T is a prime mover in the OCP Telco Project. “In our case,” said Ken Duell, AT&T’s AVP for new technology product development engineering, “it’s a matter of survival. Our customers are expecting services on demand anywhere they may be. We’re finding that open source… provides us a platform to build and deliver new services with much faster velocity.”

Verizon’s SVP/CIO Mahmoud El Assir sees a future of network personalization for customers. “(Open source) allows us to …unlock and de-aggregate our network components and accelerate the speed of innovation. … Getting compute everywhere in the network, all the way to the edge, is a key element for us.” *

Registration for the OCP Telco Project on Sept. 26 is free and is open to all telecommunications technical and engineering professionals. Workshop participation also qualifies registrants for delegate registration for the main conference on Sept. 27. Click here for more information on the workshop and to register.

DCDs new free-by-invitation delegate model means this event will be at no registration fee for qualified IT and data center executives, managers and technical professionals Click here to apply for your complimentary pass.

*(Note: Quotes from AT&T’s Duell and Verizon’s El Assir were from a panel discussion at the OCP U.S. Summit in March moderated by Wall Street Journal tech reporter Rachael King.)