NTT Joins OSDL

craigoda writes "NTT, the world's largest telecommunications company has joined the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) (Japanese) to focus on increasing the availability, clustering, and performance of Linux for use as the infrastructure OS in next generations telecommunications systems. NTT's work on Linux will be done through OSDL's Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) working group. Here is a Dow Jones Business story was released yesterday based on the rumour that NTT was joining. Looking at the OSDL web site, the rumour appears to be true."

Comments

Yeah, but...

[The Old Burke]

The OSDL was founded in 2000. Its members currently include Alcatel, Cisco, Computer Associates, Dell, Ericsson, Force Computers, Fujitsu, HP, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, Linuxcare, Miracle Linux Corporation, Mitsubishi Electric, MontaVista Software, NEC Corporation, Nokia, Red Hat, SuSE, Toshiba, and VA Software.

And now NTT.
But why are there not any American telecoms...?

Re:Yeah, but...

[chill]

But why are there not any American telecoms...?

The American telecom equipment would be Lucent, Nortel, Juniper, Ciena and a couple of others. None are in a financial position to do anything. They're not investing in a lot of R&D at the moment other than continuing existing projects.

Lucent uses Sun Solaris and HP-UX for systems control, depending on which equipment you are talking about -- ATM/FR or DWDM/Sonet/SDH. There was a pilot program initiated about a year ago in partnership with IBM Global Services to test Linux out in certain situations. I have no idea where that is at right now.

Nortel uses Red Hat in some situations. Actually, so did Lucent. Check out the bullet points in http://www.redhat.com/about/presscenter/2001/press _Q12002.html

I've seen Red Hat boxes -- rows of them -- used in Verizon (Dell servers), AT&T, Williams Communications, Sprint and others.

Japanese site translated

[kyoko21]

You can read the translated Japanese site here.

Love NTT Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

Having lived in Japan a few years this does not suprise me. NTT always had excellent phones for the end users, with features that I still have not seen over here. Back in 1996 I was connecting at 56k through a cellphone, something we just barely are starting to see over here. Another nice thing was that half the payphones had built in data ports and ISDN connections.

Re:Translation

[Xerithane]

Get out your katakana charts, kids, because Babelfish doesn't do it for you, ya' know!

The katakana in the article is "Linux", so everywhere you see non latin characters replace it with Linux.

P.S. How the hell do you type in Japanese on here? It works on Slashdot.jp, but it converts it to う or something.

Translation of the Japanese article

[Anonymous Coward]

[My comments are in square brackets. I didn't translate portions that explained what Linux is, and what OSDL is, because we're all clued in about that by now.]

NTT group plans to deliver a high-performance OS, capable of various telecommunications services, in three years. It will reduce the cost of development and operation of basic telecommunication. Linux, which has previously seen action in the public sector such as Denshi Seifu ["Electronic Government" -- some sort of Japanese buzzword] has also begun to spread in the telecommunications field [huh? the journalist got the order wrong].

NTT Group joins OSDL on the 25th. Including IBM, the organization is formed by 30 IT companies. Of the Japanese companies participating, there are NEC, Fujitsu, Toshiba, etc. totalling five companies.

NTT, like other participating companies, intends to use Linux in such things as system maintenance and managing literally millions of customers' account data and balance.

Currently, other OSes such as UNIX hold the majority of the market share. NTT plans to improve Linux's reliability and functionality for use in telecommunications.

-- 9/25 Nippon Kezai Shinbun Morning Edition