Furthering its mission to seed the industry with innovative open source platforms to advance 5G and software-defined open networking, the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) today announced that its Aether Private 5G + Edge Cloud platform, and related component projects SD-Core™, SD-RAN™ and SD-Fabric™ have now all been released under the permissive Apache 2.0 open source license.
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Aether is the first open source 5G Connected Edge platform for enabling enterprise digital transformation. Aether provides 5G mobile connectivity and edge cloud services for distributed enterprise networks. Aether represents a complete, open 5G solution, addressing RAN through Core, democratizing availability of a robust and complete software-defined 5G platform for developers.
In just 2 years, Aether has achieved significant milestones and demonstrated numerous industry firsts:
- Aether was selected for the $30M DARPA Pronto project for building secure 5G
- Aether was deployed in an ongoing field trial with Deutsche Telekom in Berlin
- Aether has been deployed in over 15 locations, operating 7×24 and delivering production-grade uptime
- Aether is the only private 5G solution leveraging the benefits of open RAN for private enterprise use cases
In the process of achieving these remarkable milestones, Aether has matured to the point where it is ready to be released to the community for broad consumption.
Aether is built upon a number of world-class component projects that are each in their own right best-in-class. Today, all the component projects are also being open sourced, including:
SD-Core 4G/5G dual-mode cloud native mobile core
SD-Fabric SDN P4 Programmable Networking Fabric
SD-RAN Open RAN implementation with RIC and xApps
Demonstrating What is Possible
The ONF stand #1F66 at Mobile World Congress (MWC) will showcase an Aether deployment, demonstrated as a cloud managed offering optimized for enterprise private networks. In the demo, devices (UEs), such as mobile phones, cameras, sensors and IoT devices, can be aggregated into device-groups, and each device-group assigned a 5G slice and connected to specific edge applications thereby extending the slicing concept to individual applications