In July, an important step forward was taken to bring old-style and new communities together in enhancing the NFV platform. This was a collaboration between the most traditional of telco alliances, the GSMA, and the main open source player in telecoms, the Linux Foundation and its Networking Fund (LFN- umbrella for many projects including ORAN Alliance). The new partnership was labelled the Common NFVi Telco Taskforce (CNTT) and set itself the aim of defining common NFV infrastructure (NFVi) reference architectures which will be submitted to LFN for testing and verification via its OPNFV (Open Platform for NFV) verification program (OVP). Three months on, the CNTT has announced its first data release, called Botrange, including the common reference model and the…