Open source continues its march into the once well-defended telco equipment fortress. Large operators are getting increasingly engaged with the disruptive Facebook-led Telecom Infra Project, which seeks to establish an open ecosystem for the RAN. And support is also growing for network virtualization software solutions based on OpenStack and other open source initiatives. Vodafone, for instance, made two parallel announcements last week – that it had joined ONAP (Open Network Automation Protocol), whose open source management and orchestration (MANO) platform is largely based on AT&T code; and that it will deploy VMware’s vCloud NFV as part of its virtualization and software-defined networking (SDN) program. This is very important for VMware, which dominates enterprise virtualization, but has often been regarded as…