Nonprofit Open Networking Laboratory (ON.Lab) just added another major player to its membership. The group, which supports open source communities to advance software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), and cloud technologies, announced a commitment this week from Comcast as a new partner.

Comcast reportedly joined ON.Lab’s Open Network Operating System (ONOS) and Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter (CORD) efforts. The initiatives are said to have a mission of enabling service delivery platforms for creating and deploying new services at cloud-like speed, independent of the access network architecture. As an open source service delivery platform, it combines SDN, NFV, and elastic cloud services, ON.Lab says.

The group further reports that a fundamental element is “software distribution of the platform stack comprising ONOS, an SDN OS for service providers with scalability, high availability, high performance, and the right abstractions to make it easy to create apps and services.”

“Software defined networking and network functions virtualization are powerful, fast-evolving tools for network transformation,” Nagesh Nandiraju, director, network architecture at Comcast, comments. “We look forward to bringing our perspective and experience to the fantastic community of technologists already working on these open source projects.”

Other service provider partners include AT&T, China Unicom, Google, NTT Communications, SK Telecom, and Verizon. Vendors include Ciena, Cisco, Ericsson (ONOS only), Fujitsu, Huawei (ONOS only), Intel, NEC, Nokia, Radisys, and Samsung.

The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) and ON.Lab announced in October their intention to merge under the ONF name. Some joint operations have already begun, led by ON.Lab Founder and Executive Director Guru Parulkar. The legal combination of Open Networking Foundation and ON.Lab is expected to be completed in late 2017.