Vendor giants form telco equipment alliance

Equipment vendors Alcatel, Ericsson, Motorola, NEC, Nokia and Siemens have joined forces to create an industry alliance to accelerate the deployment of carrier-grade base platforms for service providers.

The Scope Alliance, which will operate as a programme within the IEEE standards body, aims to promote the availability of open carrier grade base platforms based on commercial, off-the-shelf hardware and software, and free open source software building blocks.

Scope will complement other industry initiatives such as the PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group, the Service Availability Forum, the Open Source Development Lab and others.

The alliance will not create specifications, but will establish profiles that encourage the use of commercial hardware and software and free open source software.

This is designed to "enable the network equipment provider ecosystem to develop and manufacture hardware and software building blocks and platforms with higher volumes, thus lowering costs".

Scope will initially focus on creating profiles for hardware, operating system, base platform middleware and tools suites based on the Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture, Carrier Grade Linux, and the Service Availability Forum's interface specifications.

The group expects its first profile to be published before the end of March.