Panel, Broadband Forum, Munich, 25–27 June 2025. Recording.
A panel on open source in customer premises equipment. Two things I argued.
Container lifecycle management is worth having for the operational change, not the applications. Most of the discussion about containers on gateways is about what you can run on them. The part that matters to an operator is what it removes, which is the scheduled outage window for a monolithic firmware upgrade. Being able to add or remove a service on a device that stays up is a different operating model, and it is the reason to do this work at all. I made the longer version of that argument in the talk at the same event.
Most tier-one operators will be on USP within two to three years. That is my expectation rather than a forecast I can cite. The interim is the awkward part, because mixed estates still need legacy protocols backported alongside USP and that carries a real cost while it lasts. I do not think the direction is in doubt.
Two other threads from the discussion are worth recording.
The first was runtime maturity. LXC is what most container deployment on these devices runs on today, and it is heavy for the memory envelope they have. containerd, crun and OverlayFS v2 came up as where the efficiency is going to come from, which matters because the memory headroom on this class of device is not going to grow much.
The second was standards fragmentation, and it was the more interesting argument. Operators adopt the segment of a data model they need and leave the rest, so no two deployments are alike. The comparison drawn was to POSIX, which worked because it settled a common area everyone had to meet. The suggestion was that standards bodies would get further by defining the practical use cases first, the way an open-source project does, and writing the specification after that.