The recent announcement that Facebook has developed an open-source, white-box optical transmission platform has led some pundits in the industry to predict the imminent death of traditional optical vendors. While there will certainly be an impact, that prediction is significantly premature.

In 2012, an executive who worked for one of the largest European service providers shared his dream with the attendees of Layer123’s first software-defined networking (SDN) & OpenFlow World Congress in Darmstadt, Germany. According to him, the reason for all the misery in carrier-land were not permanent price battles, flat-rates, and cut-throat competition; it was us, the vendors.

Openflow is the “father of software defined networks” in the minds of many engineers. To understand Openflow, however, you cannot just look at the protocol itself; rather you must go back to the beginning, in the mists of old networking.

Some service providers are regarding the strongest users of their network as their worst enemies… the OTT’s. Those mystic folks who reside in data centers, earn billions and billions and don’t even have an own network.