Openness Matters

Evolving Fiber Broadband Services

The next decade of telecom infrastructure evolution will drive a true digital transformation in the connected world. The telco industry is already undergoing a significant transformation with the enablement of advanced wireless and wireline technology introduction in a software-defined, open standards, disaggregated and cloud-native networking environment.

Now, more than ever – openness matters. 

Open telecom solutions have significant advantages for the broadband optical access networking layer with the disaggregation of the hardware and software components. By separating the software from the hardware, service providers can now gain flexibility with the selection of white-box optical line terminals (OLTs) and merchant silicon from a multi-vendor ecosystem. Rather than being tied to a limited set of proprietary or closed vendor solutions, service providers gain time-to-market efficiencies from being able to tap into a multi-vendor supply chain. With open standards interface connectivity between the white box OLT hardware and software systems, they can optimize the infrastructure integration and deployment costs. They also achieve operational efficiencies by gaining increased visibility into their infrastructure via efficient use of open APIs integrated into their management systems, driving intelligent automation in the network, and thus accelerating new services introduction. 

However, disaggregation does raise some interesting new challenges as well. FTTH/Wireline service providers need a one-stop/turn-key solution when facing technical/operational challenges associated with their networking gear while troubleshooting multi-vendor interworking issues in an open standards environment. They need the right set of management tools, techniques, and intelligent data insights at various interfaces in the end-to-end user data connectivity path as well as cross-functional layers within their equipment. 

The ability to offer deeper customer data insights is extremely valuable in creating unique value propositions for telecom infrastructure vendors’ products and services in an open networking environment. Radisys is building smart hooks in with software intelligence in our networking gear as a true differentiator. The data insights can be easily extracted via smart management systems either natively or when integrated with an external operations/business support systems, analyzed, and effectively utilized to simplify service providers’ day-to-day operations, while ensuring their legacy/new customer base is served with the best quality of experience in a cost-effective manner. These data insights can also be used for historical trending, driving intelligent automation, building AI models based on equipment as well as end user service usage patterns, further optimizing geo-targeted networking, and applications, and offering interactive services.

The timing is right to focus on openness in network architectures that are becoming more user centric and can deliver significant value via the convergence of wireless and wired networks in a cloud native environment.

For my new “Openness Matters” blog series, I’ll be taking a look at the key areas that open solutions impact, including:

• Network convergence
• The move towards containerization
• Enhanced network visualization 
• Services optimization 
• Network cost reduction
• Rapid deployment of new services 

In my next blog, I’ll dive into how service providers can deploy multiple access network that leverage advances in open standards and wireless and wireline networking technologies.