German telecoms company Deutsche Telekom has joined Linux Foundation Networking (LFN) to support its efforts in accelerating the development and adoption of open source networking technologies. With the addition of Deutsche Telekom, LFN projects now enable nearly 70 percent of all global mobile subscribers.

The benefits: With its extensive global footprint, Deutsche Telekom will help accelerate LFN globally, contributing to emerging network technologies critical to enabling 5G services. LFN supports the momentum of open source networking, integrating governance of participating projects in order to enhance operational excellence, simplify member engagement, and increase collaboration.

Deutsche Telekom is also an active participant in the ONAP project and plans to contribute to the next platform release, Casablanca.

With a staff of more than 200,000 employees throughout the world, Deutsche Telekom will help drive the LFN initiative into new regions and spread the continued adoption of open standards and open source.

“With Deutsche Telekom on board, we look forward to witnessing their work in connectivity and service, integrated gigabit networks, secure ICT solutions and big IoT while collaborating with them on major industry challenges to transform all aspects of the network and accelerate open source deployments,” said Arpit Joshipura, General Manager of Networking and Orchestration, The Linux Foundation.

Arash Ashouriha, SVP Technology Architecture & Innovation, Deutsche Telekom, added: “The work in ONAP will complement our activities in ETSI-ZSM to lead the industry towards a fully automated network and service management. This will be a critical success factor for our companies to leverage the full benefits of 5G. We see great value in the global collaboration LFN provides for accelerating that process, for both our businesses and customers.”