Verizon may have been quieter about its white box and SDN (software-defined networking) strategies than AT&T, but it share its rival’s ambition to transform its costs and efficiencies by deploying disaggregated, virtualized platforms everywhere. Indeed, it is further advanced than AT&T in one critical area at least, convergence, having merged its wireline and wireless operations as well as its next generation architecture. However, while AT&T has used the SDN program to shake up its supply chain, Verizon has been more cautious. AT&T has developed key software elements, and hardware reference designs, inhouse – sometimes with unfamiliar vendor partners – and donated some of that work to open initiatives like the Linux Foundation’s ONAP and O-RAN, or Facebook’s Open Compute Project.…