Lanner Electronics announced on Monday that it had teamed up with Intel to help build the second generation of Verizon's universal customer premises equipment (uCPE) offering.
Verizon's uCPE 2.0 launch is targeted at small and medium-sized deployments by using the lower cost white boxes. Using Lanner's white boxes, the uCPE service features Intel's x86 Atom-based processors with scale pre-defined for small and medium multi-core architectures.
Those architectures support both DPDK (data plane development kit) and OpenStack's SR-IOV for the port configurations. Aside of lowering costs by using off the shelf x86 devices, white box uCPE deployments also split virtual network functions (VNFs) apart from the hardware devices. With uCPE, service providers can use multiple VNFs, and eventually cloud-native functions, on a single platform.
With uCPE and network function virtualization (NFV), service providers can utilize the benefits of the cloud by replacing closed appliances with their choice of software that can be hosted anywhere in the network on their choice of open hardware.
"We learned from our uCPE 1.0 program that we needed very close collaboration with the hardware and software eco-system partners. We expected the community to work together to address the technical and business challenges for network transformation," said Verizon's Beth Cohen, cloud product technologist, in a statement. "Lanner's flexibility as well as close collaboration with the ecosystem is bringing the foundation for a long lasting working relationship in these challenging network transformation.
"Also, we've achieved 2.5x the performance running on the Lanner platform over our previous platform."
RELATED: Colt Technology Services puts revamped uCPE offering into play
Last week, Colt Technology Service announced the second version of its uCPE service was available across its footprint. Like Colt, Verizon is using Adva's Ensemble Controller as the network operating system for third-party applications and services such as new VNFs, SD-WAN or new virtual firewalls.
Masergy, AT&T and Orange Business Services have also deployed uCPE solutions, among others.