Challenges in the Face of Digital Transformation The Communication Service Provider (CSP) landscape is changing rapidly in the face of the digital era. New and stronger competition, growing customer demands, increased operational costs and evolving technologies are just a few of the challenges CSPs face today. CSPs are now required to adopt a digital strategy…
Introduction Accurate network inventory data is a critical foundation for delivering new services and minimizing the impact of maintenance and outages, with significant flow-through impact on both cost and revenue. That said, access to accurate inventory data is a big challenge for most, if not all Communications Service Providers, because today’s inventory validation and audit…
Automation is one of the big rising stars of networking. It has attracted huge industry interest of late, with Light Reading dedicating a whole category to the topic and many industry events, including Layer123’s SDN NFV World Congress, hosting significant automation tracks. Carriers are building requirements around it in their RFP processes, and analyst firms…
Service providers globally are converging on a control model to achieve the significant goal of automating service creation and assurance from data centers, through the network, to customer premises equipment. In this model, a centralized network controller delivers end-to-end network abstraction, automation, and service awareness, thus considerably simplifying the work of service orchestrators. Realization of…
Selecting the right IP/optical network controller is critical for end-to-end service delivery. There is no room for capability gaps in the solution and we encourage you to carefully consider your options. We suggest asking suppliers the following questions to determine whether the solution can truly deliver comprehensive, accurate visibility and control in a real-world multilayer,…
What’s the difference between the challenges faced by Telecom service providers and cable operators in their high-capacity backbone and metro networks? Not much, actually. We learned this at the CableLabs Winter Conference in Orlando this week. The central problem is essentially the same: separate IP/MPLS and Optical network layers with little or no visibility between…
Our announcement about raising $13.6M in round B funding has attracted plenty of attention. It was kick started in a blog item by Marcin Hejka, Vice President of Intel Capital. Announcing Intel’s investment in three Israel companies, Sedona being one of them, Hejka wrote that Sedona, “Is improving the connectivity of the world’s networks and the efficiency…
In a recent interview, Google’s Head of Datacenter Fabric and Inter-DC Networking, Vijoy Pandey, urged service providers to stop waiting for SDN/NFV standards to emerge. Instead, he advised, “Just go ahead and build this stuff… start deploying a few things, and you’ll see the benefits right away.” Well, I couldn’t agree more. The words SDN and NFV have…
We went to OFC 2016 with very high expectations. After all, we were about to demonstrate in Anaheim, California, the world’s first multilayer, multivendor automatic restoration of a fiber cut. Nevertheless, we were overwhelmed by the responses of operators, vendors, and analysts. In our booth and outside it, multilayer control was a major theme in…
I will be discussing the requirements that multilayer control imposes on the northbound interface (NBI) of the Optical layer controller and the IP/MPLS layer controller. This unique perspective calls for some non-obvious requirements that have not been discussed so far in standard bodies (such as IETF and ONF) and open-source forums (such as ODL and…