How we invented a better couch experience

Part 1 of the story of RDK-B and new routers using open source.

One of the most revolutionary developments at #deutschetelekom in recent years has actually been happening quite quietly: Our routers, the most important gateway to our customers, will be running open source software in the future. I'll be explaining what this will mean for our customers and for us in a three-part series of articles. Don't miss any of it, it's going to be exciting!

How to give up control to gain more control

It almost sounds like a paradox: In the development of future router generations, Deutsche Telekom has opened up to an open source community, separating hardware from software development and even cooperating with competitors. That sounds almost revolutionary, and actually it is. Discover the whole development now in part one of the #rdk story.

Let us take a look back first.

For decades, Telekom sourced one of its most important gateways to the customer from different manufacturers – the router. The software was built according to our requirements and designed according to Telekom's design and security conditions, and the devices were Magenta branded. In some cases, Telekom took routers off the shelf. This is a common procedure, but you always remain dependent on the developers of the hardware manufacturers and naturally have only limited direct influence on the performance of the devices, the basic operating concept and on further development cycles.?

In short, the customer experience on one of the most important interfaces to the customer was not under Telekom's full control.?

It was time to change that. Time to build up the #RDKFactory – or to put it more correctly: To participate in the RDK-B open source community.

It was a long journey but now we are almost there.

In my position as Innovation Lead Connectivity, I am already a part of the history of RDK-B’s development. Together with? Omar TAZI ,? André Almeida ?and? Pedro Bandeira , I have been in the project from early on – and I remember the start as a remarkable event. Let me clarify the questions I have been asked most frequently.

What is RDK-B?

RDK-B stands for "Reference Design Kit for Broadband". This is an initiative of network providers, system integrators and equipment manufacturers. It aims to standardize functions of broadband devices via a worldwide community of software developers. This enables a wide variety of providers to efficiently provide basic services for home networks. Wi-Fi, for example. The product is a router middleware, that is available as a free-license product.

Who built it? The RDK-B Factory

Robert Zehder , our Executive Product Manager, explains the project in this way:

“In this open source project, 500 companies are using this open source stack and 70 companies are contributing, and one of the bigger contributors is Deutsche Telekom. But it would be wrong to say that we are contributing more than we're using it because in the first step there was a big portfolio of functionalities we could use. Within the community there are more than 100 million devices worldwide running RDK”.

The RDK-B Factory is the organization that was set up to develop the router software. It is “located” in different places in Europe and mainly in India. The outcome of the factory will result in a major improvement in the customer and service agent experience coming from data-driven use cases and high-quality software.

The main challenge for the RDK-B Factory is to manage the scaling across the devices. In the past, we had different OEMs develop different software for the devices – now we have one software stack for all of the devices and all of the NatCos. The challenge here is to synchronize the requirements and then to automate the production process and the testing process as much as possible.

But where did it all start and how did it begin? That will be revealed in the next article. Stay tuned, it starts stone cold.