Every week brings a new development in the rapidly moving area of open source platforms for telcos, many of them driven by operators which want to free themselves from the stranglehold of their established vendors and shake up their cost base. In this context, one of the demonstrations at this month’s Mobile World Congress will be particularly important. Run by the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), it will show the latest code written for the P4 programming language, running on powerful white box switches based on merchant switch-chips from Barefoot Networks, Cavium and Mellanox. The operators supporting this demonstration include AT&T, China Unicom, Comcast, Deutsche Telekom, NTT Group and Turk Telecom, and significantly, they are joined by Google. Significantly because, while…