Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) has announced their Flexible Access System Architecture (FASA) as part of their strategy to encourage sales of white box hardware for the optical access network.

White Box sales of Ethernet Switches for data centers have been steady if unspectacular as reported by Dell’Oro (report on Data Center white boxes).  The concept of combining specialized software with generic switching hardware should lead to high-quality and lower costs as compared to the traditional all-Cisco or all-Juniper solution.  The question is whether a similar approach can work for optical OLTS in the access network.  NTT seems to believe so.  A year ago they announced NetroSphere (NetroSphere announcement), their concept to bring general purpose white boxes to the optical realm.  They followed up this week with a key building block, their Flexible Access System Architecture (FASA).

API layer in the FASA concept

To facilitate an open access multi-vendor environment, NTT says it working on development of APIs for FASA with multiple suppliers. The first of these API’s is scheduled to be released in May.

For more details on NTT’s FASA announcement, refer to http://www.ntt.co.jp/news2016/1602e/160208a.html