White (and bright) box network devices[1] for transport network might be different from white-boxes for datacenters. The datacenter ones are based on specific ASICs[2] - their functionality might not be enough for transport networks. Some innovative vendors understood this challenge and started offering devices based on programmable chips: FPGAs[3] or network processors[4] (NPUs). This enables white-boxes to process advanced instructions needed to implement rich transport network protocols as well as gives some extensibility.
Rough estimation shows that white box switches for transport networks are ~30% more expensive that the datacenter ones. Both have price advantage over traditional routers. Hardware price reduction is the first main benefit of adopting white-boxes, but not the least (see more about synergy between white-boxes and management applications in Phase 3).
It seems unlikely that white-boxes will completely replace traditional devices in short and medium term, but they must not be ignored as:
- They are a better choice than traditional devices for some use cases (highly automated services, for example)
They are a great leverage on traditional vendors’ prices in the rest of the use cases.
[1] ““generic,” off-the-shelf switches and routers within the forwarding plane of a software-defined network (SDN)” - https://www.sdxcentral.com/cloud/converged-datacenter/whitebox/.