Carrier Grade Linux: Adoption and Deployments - page 5

CGL is Real and Building Momentum...

NEC Case Study

In May 2005, members of the CGL initiatives (including this author) had the opportunity to meet with some service providers, carriers and NEPs. The goals of the meetings were to receive input about the future direction of the CGL initiative beyond CGL 3.1 and to receive feedback regarding current CGL deployments.

One of the more interesting deploying stories came from NEC. This Japan-based member NEP is providing GGSN (Gateway GPRS Serving Node) and SGSN (Servicing GPRS Serving Node) CGL-based server nodes to major Asian Carriers. NEC has already deployed over 100 nodes servicing over 10 million subscribers. These deployments have been in a commercial setting for over six months. Based on this positive experience, NEC's customers have plans to implement other nodes in their mobile infrastructure using the sample platform architecture (see Figure 12) based on COTS hardware and CGL.

BT Case Study

Another deployment story comes from British Telecom Global who has been running a pilot project in Belgium for a COTS-based platform to provide voice services. The architecture of the platform is shown in Figure 13 and has Carrier Grade Linux as a core component.

The pilot project has been successful and the platform has been providing service in a mission-critical environment for months. BT Global is in the process of investigating the roll-out of this platform across their EU network.

During SuperComm 2005 (June 6-9) in Chicago, Mr. Paul Reynolds (Chief Executive of BT Wholesale) was interviewed by the SuperComm Daily (on June 7):

"We knew we had to break from normal conventions and view whole life cost, and build everything as much as possible on open standards, where we had access to source code and could expect plug and play compatibility."

Open platforms based on industry defined standards and building practices are the way forward; CGL is one core component of such platforms.