Verizon has taken the first step toward "true" white boxes that will eventually rely on merchant silicon instead of vendor-specific ASICs.

Verizon's partnership with router vendors Cisco and Juniper Networks yielded white boxes that decouple those vendors' software from hardware to create a multiservice edge platform.

While that decoupling does further sever the hardware bond between Verizon and its vendors, at the same it pushes Cisco and Juniper toward the software solutions that telcos are now seeking.

Michael Altland, Verizon's director of network infrastructure planning, said the key for Cisco and Juniper was pulling their software from their routers and then putting them onto the common compute x86 boxes while maintaining the same levels of technical requirements such as failure characteristics and scalability.

"This is the early steps of white boxes in a WAN environment," Altland said. "It's not true white box where you are running merchant silicon. It's still custom silicon and controlled by that vendor's software, but they are no longer tightly coupled in terms of if you run out of control plane resources you exhaust the entire router. Now I have the flexibility to scale the control plane separately from the hardware."

The eventual endgame is to evolve to true white boxes that can tap into merchant silicon instead of vendor silicon. Altland said the new boxes were beneficial to both capital expense and operating expense for Verizon. By being able to buy white boxes off the shelf, telcos will pay less while also gaining operational efficiencies such as flexibility and scalability.