Vodafone UK has signed up for Ciena’s Blue Planet orchestration software as the latest stage in its huge project to re-architect its transport network.
Some of this network is based on fiber connections acquired in 2012 when Vodafone bought C&W Worldwide. That was a first step in Vodafone’s bid to become a fixed/mobile operator in its home country, and also to fiberize its cell sites as the rise in mobile data traffic forced it to move from leased copper backhaul lines to fiber.
But the C&W network was already ageing and legacy equipment has been targeted by a multiyear decommissioning process for several years. In the process, that infrastructure has evolved into Vodafone Redstream, a software-defined network (SDN) with equipment and software from Cisco, Ciena, Juniper and Nokia.
Blue Planet will manage and orchestrate the optical and IP layers, including equipment from Ciena’s competitors.
Vodafone UK’s chief network officer Andrea Dona said the C&W topology “didn’t lend itself to a cost-efficient expansion… so we decided to rearchitect our backbone transport network into an edge-based architecture. We’re moving to edge-based regional aggregation nodes that are further detached from the center… so as we expand our mobile broadband capacity, and we’ve got maybe some hotspots of traffic, we can [just] upgrade the last box. Sometimes we might have to do the full chain but not in all cases.”
Blue Planet will add a transport domain orchestrator (TDO) to the mix, to increase automation and enable the roll-out of network-as-a-service offerings based on end-to-end network slicing across Layers 1 to 3. As well as enabling new services for enterprises and even consumers, the automated, programmable transport network saves operating costs, as part of Vodafone’s group-wide cost-cutting exercise, which aims to cut annual opex by €1.2bn ($1.4bn) between 2018 and 2021.
Dona told LightReading that Redstream will be a strong foundation for the upcoming launch of a mobile edge computing service in partnership with AWS and its Wavelengths platform. Dona said Redstream minimizes the number of Wavelength edge data centers that will be needed to support low latency services such as VR gaming or industrial IoT. “I am inventing the numbers, but we would plan our MEC presence and say ‘can I afford to have three to start off, or do I need nine?’,” he said. “I would go to nine if I had a really sub-optimal transport network but might be able to afford two or three if I have a really efficient, scalable transport network.”