Proof in Production: Inside the 2026 OpenLAN Global Summit

The second annual OpenLAN Global Summit capped three days of Wi-Fi World Congress USA 2026 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. The message from speakers, operators, and contributors was consistent throughout the day: OpenLAN has moved past the question of whether open and disaggregated networking can work at scale. It already is.

A mainstream moment for open and disaggregated

Earlier in the day, Join Digital, NetExperience, and RG Nets took the Wi-Fi World Congress main stage to show the broader Wi-Fi industry what a production open stack looks like across enterprise and hospitality deployments. Wi-Fi NOW described the resulting deployment numbers as "parabolic," and the week of conversation that followed reinforced the case.

OpenLAN Project Group Chair Steve Martin, CEO of Shasta Cloud, opened the summit with a vision to match the momentum: Shasta Cloud is building toward powering the platform for the next 50 million buildings. He framed the community's growth across contributors, ODMs, and operators choosing open over closed.

A working, multi-continent engineering community

Jaspreet Sachdev of Kinara Systems, OpenLAN's Technical Project Manager, walked the audience through the three subgroups that define OpenLAN today:

• OpenWiFi (OWF) — open, disaggregated Wi-Fi with validated whitebox hardware and cloud controllers

• OpenLAN Switching (OLS) — a multi-vendor, interoperable switching solution built on the OpenWiFi foundation

• OpenLAN Gateway (OLG) — open-source on-prem routing, security, and compute for the in-building edge

The OpenLAN blueprint ties these together into a unified, multi-vendor stack from access to edge.

Jaspreet then pulled up a global engineering map showing roughly three dozen contributing organizations across ten countries, including the US, Canada, Taiwan, India, Israel, China, Germany, Spain, Ukraine, and Vietnam. Operators, ODMs, silicon vendors, NOS contributors, and cloud-controller vendors were all represented. This is a working, multi-continent community shipping production code on a regular cadence.

He also covered the near-term OpenWiFi roadmap, focused on the operational enhancements, stability, and performance work that matters most as deployments scale.

OLS 5.0: hardened, validated, and shipping

Tobias Schwartz of CyberTAN presented the state of OpenLAN Switching. OLS 5.0 is now the baseline across all switches, with validated coverage spanning Edgecore, Asterfusion, Larch Networks, and CyberTAN, and deep enterprise L2/L3, security, and operational feature support. He showcased the diverse SKUs the OpenLAN community is producing and closed with CyberTAN's roadmap and continued commitment to OpenLAN.

OLG: the newest subgroup takes shape

Doron Givoni presented the status of OpenLAN Gateway, the newest of the three subgroups and among the most ambitious. OLG extends the open, disaggregated model into on-prem routing, security, and compute, completing the in-building network story.

The WAN edge has historically been the most vendor-locked layer of the network. OLG applies the OpenWiFi playbook (open hardware, open firmware, and an interoperable cloud protocol) to change that. With olg-ucentral-schema already public on the TIP GitHub and modern ARM-based open gateway platforms emerging, the ecosystem is taking shape quickly.

Lessons from operators and suppliers choosing open

Actiontec, one of North America's largest connectivity device suppliers, walked through its adoption of OpenLAN. The signal was clear: open and disaggregated is the path established suppliers are choosing as they extend into Wi-Fi 7, gateways, and cloud-managed enterprise networking.

Mohsin Maqsood, Director of Product Innovation at WorldVue and OpenLAN PG Co-Chair, shared production learnings from running OpenLAN across hospitality networks. His key takeaways: reduced risk, greater control over vendor dependency, and the reality that simplicity wins at scale.

An idea worth tracking: SASE in open source

Karl May, CEO and Founder of Join Digital, floated an idea that sparked some of the most active hallway conversations of the day: bringing SASE into open source as a natural extension of OpenLAN, sitting alongside the OLG layer.

Enterprise security remains one of the few pillars of vendor lock-in left on top of the LAN. Karl noted that the same open, community-governed model that worked for OpenWiFi and OLS could potentially close that loop. The idea isn't on a formal roadmap today, and it's one the community will continue to explore.

Looking ahead

Olli Andersson, CTO of TIP, closed the summit by anchoring the day in the broader TIP context. Open and disaggregated is a proven model delivering across every TIP Project Group, and the community continues to design and bring forward complex solutions, such as the recently delivered PKI 2.0. He pointed ahead to FYUZ 2026 as the next major moment for the community to convene.

The OpenLAN community will carry this momentum through Network X and WBA events across the rest of the year, and into FYUZ 2026, November 3–5 in Seattle.

Follow OpenLAN's progress

If you're an operator, ODM, integrator, or contributor who wants to shape what comes next, now is the moment to engage. Learn more at telecominfraproject.com/openlan.

Be sure to follow OpenLAN's new showcase page on LinkedIn, where the Project Group will share important announcements and highlight the community driving the work forward. Follow us at https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/tip-openlan.