Thursday, July 27, 2017

The Need for SD-WAN Service Definitions and Open APIs



SD-WAN is one of the biggest transformations in telecom in the last 20 years, says Nav Chander, Senior Director of Service Provider Marketing at Silver Peak.  There is a significant role for the MEF in SD-WAN because the industry is in need of service definitions. The MEF has proven itself very adept at building such consensus.

Recorded at the MEF Annual Members' Meeting in Toronto.

See video:  https://youtu.be/Qe5ZS4dND4Q



Telefónica announces restructuring

As part of the company's ongoing transformation program, Telefonica executive chairman José María Álvarez-Pallete has unveiled a new organisational structure designed to support business growth and facilitate the implementation and delivery of corporate objectives.

As part of this initiative, Telefonic's nominating, compensation and corporate governance committee has approved the appointment of Ángel Vilá Boix, formerly chief strategy and finance officer, as its new chief operating officer (COO). Therefore, at a meeting of Telefonica's board of directors. Ángel Vilá will be proposed as a member of the board and executive director, taking up the vacancy created by the departure of Julio Linares from the board.

Julio Linares has been proposed as a member of the board of directors of Telefónica Brasil and Telefónica Deutschland, and will continue to represent the company institutionally in several organisations.

The appointment of Ángel Vilá Boix as COO will consolidate the operational model introduced in 2014. With the appointment, Telefonica's five operating businesses - Spain, Brazil, Hispanoamérica, Germany and the UK - as well as the chief commercial digital officer and the chief global resources officer, will report directly to the COO.

Under the new structure, Laura Abasolo will become chief finance and control officer, reporting directly to the executive chairman, José María Alvarez-Pallete. Laura Abasolo is currently director of planning, accounting and control, and has been a member of the executive committee since March 2014.

In addition, the current director of corporate development and Fonditel, Enrique Lloves, will become head of a new strategy and corporate development area, and will also join the executive committee.

As a result of these changes, the following personnel will report directly to Telefónica's executive chairman: COO Angel Vilá; group general counsel Ramiro Sánchez de Lerín; chief data officer Jose María Alonso; chief finance and control officer Laura Abasolo; head of corporate communication and institutional marketing Jose Luis Gómez-Navarro; head of public affairs and regulation Carlos López Blanco; head of strategy and corporate development Enrique Lloves; chief of staff María García-Legaz; and chairman public affairs Francisco de Bergia.

Additionally, the committee will propose that global CTO Enrique Blanco should take responsibility for the systems area, currently led by Phil Jordan as global chief information officer, who is to leave the company. The committee will also propose that Telefónica Open Future be integrated into the innovation area, led by Gonzalo Martín-Villa.

Ángel Vilá Boix

Ángel Vilá has served in a number of executive roles with Telefonica Group since the late 1990, and executed key corporate transactions including those relating to O2 plc, Brasilcel/Vivo, EPlus, GVT and the Telefonica Germany IPO.


Ángel Vilá currently serves as a board member of Telefónica Germany and as a trustee in the Telefónica Foundation. He has previously served on the boards of Telco SpA (Italy), BBVA, Digital Plus, Atento, Telefónica Contenidos, Telefónica Czech Republic, Endemol, CTC Chile, Indra SSI and on the advisory panel of Macquarie MEIF funds.

Alaska Communications deploys Ciena

Ciena announced that Alaska Communications has upgraded its terrestrial and AKORN submarine networks using its solutions to improve Internet access and enable secure, reliable connectivity in Alaska.

The network upgrades are also designed to support demand for mobile broadband services, provide a cloud enablement platform for businesses and allow Alaska Communications to continue delivering unlimited Internet to residents. The additional network capacity will help customers such as hospitals and the education sector utilise critical applications and improve their services.

Alaska Communications serves businesses, schools, health care providers, state and local governments and other carriers via its terrestrial and subsea networks. The operator's AKORN undersea optical cable network links Alaska and Oregon and traverses a geographically-diverse secondary path to help reduce the potential for service disruption.
Ciena stated that the network upgrade will increase network capacity from the Lower 48 to Alaska four-fold leveraging its GeoMesh solution. Leveraging the traffic grooming and aggregation capabilities of the new scalable, OTN-switched Ciena network, Alaska Communications is able to more quickly turn up new services and deliver low-latency, high-capacity connectivity, and thereby provide an improved customer experience.


* In January, Anchorage-based Quintillion announced the deployment of Ciena's 8700 Packetwave Platform to support the first phase of its planned 15,000-km intercontinental subsea system that will connect Europe and Asia via the Alaskan and Canadian Arctic. Quintillion's Phase 1 network build in Alaska will connect Nome and Prudhoe Bay, with branches into four rural coastal communities: Barrow, Point Hope, Wainwright and Kotzebue.

* The company also stated it was building a new terrestrial fibre system between Prudhoe Bay and Fairbanks that will also provide a link between the continental U.S. and the Arctic.


* In March, Alaska Communications announced an agreement with Quintillion to provide corporations, government agencies, healthcare services and schools in northwest Alaska with access to high-speed broadband and managed IT services.

Huawei expands D-CCAP portfolio with FTTB Giga Coax access

Huawei announced at the Cable Tech Show 2017 in Tokyo the launch of the MA5633-XB10, claimed to be the first Giga Coax access product enabling the delivery of gigabit bandwidth for MSOs that is designed for installation in corridors.

Huawei noted that the new product addresses the trend of moving fibre closer to end users on hybrid fibre-coaxial (HFC) networks, and expands its existing distributed-converged cable access platform (D-CCAP) solution portfolio.

Huawei's D-CCAP solution is a gigabit coaxial access solution specifically designed for MSOs. The solution allows video and data modulation to be supported at remote optical sites and thereby enables platform sharing with FTTH networks. The new MA5633-XB10 offers high capacity, compact size and low power consumption together with a distributed architecture, and is designed to deliver up to 1,000 Mbit/s bandwidth over coaxial cables to support a full range of data and video services.
Capabilities of the new MA5633-XB10 solution include:

1.         Support for 32 x 10 DOCSIS 3.0 channels, delivering a downstream rate of 1.6 Gbit/s and an upstream rate of 300 Mbit/s, sufficient to support 4K and 8K HD video.

2.         A compact, 'pizza box' package, with streamlined fins for heat dissipation and a fan-free design to reduce power consumption and allow for installation in narrow indoor cabinets.

3.         Capacity to support up to 256 households from a single platform, plus support for on-demand frequency configuration to allows operators to flexibly expand device capacities.


4.         Distributed, modular architecture that enables the future transition to FTTH, offering the ability to work with the MA5800 distributed smart OLT deployed at a central office and therefore support evolution to CloudFAN.

Japan's JPIX extends Internet exchange to Equinix Osaka

Equinix and Japan Internet Exchange (JPIX), a major Internet exchange (IX) service provider in Japan, announced that JPIX has extended its peering fabric to the Equinix International Business Exchange (IBX) data centre in Osaka, OS1, to meet increasing data centre and IX demands from international and domestic network operators in the OS1 IBX data centre.

With the addition of IX points of JPIX in OS1, Equinix customers will be able to interconnect and peer directly with JPIX's diverse aggregation of ISPs, cable TV service providers and content providers, enabling traffic exchange with greater reliability, improved performance and lower cost.

As a leading IX service provider in Japan, JPIX provides traffic exchange for 160-plus customers, including ISPs, cable operators and contents providers.

Equinix noted that JPIX established an IX switch at the Equinix TY2 IBX data centre in Tokyo in 2008, subsequently extending its services to all Equinix facilities in Tokyo (TY1 to 10) via Equinix Metro Connect, a dark fibre network that connects all of Equinix's Tokyo data centres.


* As part of its expansion in the Asia Pacific region, Equinix has recently announced plans to expand its SY4 IBX data centre in Sydney, Australia to meet demand for capacity and interconnection services, and the eighth phased expansion of its SG2 IBX facility in Singapore to address market demand for direct connectivity to cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services, Oracle Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.


* Equinix also recently launched dedicated, private access to Oracle Cloud at its Sydney IBX data centre leveraging Oracle Cloud Network Service - FastConnect and the Equinix Cloud Exchange.

Wave2Wave launches ROME 250 optical switching

Wave2Wave Solution based in Milpitas, California, a supplier of solutions enabling automated data centre connectivity, announced its ROME 250 Robotic Optical Switching platform, extending the ROME portfolio with a smaller, lower cost platform designed to allow telecom and data centre operators to migrate to software defined networking (SDN) down to the physical connectivity layer.

Wave2Wave stated that building on the success of the ROME 500 solution and the scalability of ROME fabric, the new ROME 250 offers increased granularity that is compatible with network architecture and software interfaces. As processing of data moves towards the network edge, ROME 250 is claimed to offer significant capex savings via support for 100's or 1,000's of network cross connect points, while also helping reduce opex to near zero.

The ROME 250 platform offers 256 fibre end points in a 19 inch 10 RU chassis, with te ability to support either single mode or multi-mode OM4 fibre connections. As with ROME 500, ROME 250 is integrated with a range of third party orchestration software platforms.
Describing the new solution, David Wang, founder and CEO of Wave2Wave, said, "ROME closes the last gap for a fully automated and software defined network in data centres and telecom infrastructure… ROME… (enables) a dynamic architecture and automated provisioning process".


* In October 2016, Wave2Wave introduced the EVO Switch+ connectivity solution, designed for spine-and-leaf networks with mixed data rates. EVO Switch+ is deployed alongside high density switches to simplify 100 to 25 Gbit/s or 40 to 10 Gbit/s network configurations to help IT managers implement projects.

Key features of the EVO Switch+ include: support for QSFP28 to SFP28 or QSFP+ to SFP+ optical interfaces; 1 U or 2 U form factors; and plug-and-play capability via MTP/MPO cables in either single mode or multi-mode.

EVO Switch+ serves as an add-on to Layer-2 switches from vendors including Arista, Brocade, Cisco, Dell and Juniper

Brazil's Algar Telecom selects Sonus cloud-native SBC

Sonus Networks, a global provider of solutions for securing cloud and real-time communications, announced that Brazil's Algar Telecom has selected the Sonus Session Border Controller Software Edition (SBC SWe) to support the nationwide expansion of its SIP peering and SIP trunking services.

Algar is a private communications service provider in Brazil that offers voice, video, data and IT services to businesses and residential customers. Leveraging the Sonus cloud-native solution, Algar will gain network-wide sharing of SBC session licenses and the ability to dynamically allocate SBC capacity where it is need across the country. With Sonus' SBC SWe, Algar will be able to quickly expand its SIP services footprint without the need to deploy new hardware.

The Sonus SBC SWe and its associated Sonus Insight Element Management System (EMS) will be deployed as virtual network functions (VNFs) across Algar's network. This approach aligns with the company's push towards implementing an advanced network functions virtualisation (NFV) architecture.

Sonus noted that as service providers migrate real-time communications to NFV and cloud environments, the Sonus SBC SWe provides a cloud-native approach for SIP session management, interworking, security and resiliency while offering the reliability and features of hardware-based SBCs. The Sonus SBC SWe has been deployed in more than 100 networks to date.

Algar Telecom, a part of the Algar group, provides high-speed Internet access, mobile services, cable TV, voice, data, IT and infrastructure and outsourcing services. Algar Telecom has a presence in all of the main regions of Brazil and operates a network with 19,000 miles of optical fibre serving 1.4 million customers in the states of Sao Paulo, Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro, Goiás, Mato Grosso do Sul, Parana, Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul, as well as the federal district.

Hammer Fiber teams with Go Long Wireless

Hammer Fiber Optic Investments, a New Jersey-based wireless and fibre network operator and a wholly owned subsidiary of Hammer Fiber Optic Holdings, announced it has partnered with Go Long Wireless (GLW) based in Sarasota, Florida, which holds 12 GHz multi-channel video distribution and data service (MVDDS) spectrum in 49 U.S. markets and covering more than 29 million people.

Through the partnership, Hammer Fiber will be able to expand its business model of delivering a bundle of high speed broadband, TV and VoIP service to the additional 49 markets, with a focus on addressing underserved rural communities.

Hammer Fiber noted that its business model has been proven in Atlantic City, New Jersey where a pre-5G 'wireless fibre' network is delivering a triple play bundle of high speed broadband, 4K UHD capable TV and VoIP service. Utilising off the shelf DOCSIS 3.0/3.1 modems, the Hammer technology platform is designed to leverage the cable-ready architecture and to be scalable by enabling low cost and ease of installation.

Go Long Wireless is a member of the MVDDS 5G Coalition Partnership, which is awaiting the outcome of a pending FCC ruling that is expected to add MVDDS spectrum to the 5G spectrum band. The addition of MVDDS spectrum to the 5G band would help to meet future demand for bandwidth.

Hammer Fiber's 5G Carrier Wireless Fiber Technology, which is provided by the company's wireless division under the AIR name, is designed to be compliant with future 5G standards, which are expected to be published over the next year. Hammer Fibre stated that its AIR technology is capable of carrying LTE-compatible service over 500 MHz wide broadband channels to fixed LTE subscriber modems and small cells utilising mmWave, or KA/KU band, spectrum.


Hammer Fiber offers internet, voice, video and data services to residential and small business customers in New Jersey, as well as carrier services in Philadelphia and New York. The company delivers high capacity broadband, voice and video both via direct fibre and the Hammer Wireless AIR wireless fibre platform.