In order to better support its 5G, AI and cloud services via automation, Telefónica Deutschland picked software from Ciena’s Blue Planet division.
Telefónica Deutschland is building a new transport network with the help of Blue Planet’s software. The new transport network uses software-defined networking (SDN) orchestration along with a partially disaggregated multi-vendor network architecture.
By using Blue Planet, Telefónica Deutschland hopes to lower its opex while also optimizing its network for new services such as 5G, video streaming and online gaming.
With the proliferation of cloud-based services, along with the advent of 5G and IoT deployments, software-based network automation is becoming crucial to service providers of all stripes as well as for enterprises and data centers. Blue Planet’s software and network architecture include SDN and network functions virtualization (NFV).
Blue Planet will play a key role in Telefónica Deutschland’s iFusion platform, which uses SDN on its transport network in Germany. Specifically, Telefónica is using Blue Planet’s Multi-Domain Services Orchestration (MDSO) software to automate end-to-end service delivery across its new transport network.
Using Blue Planet’s Open Rest APIs from MDSO also simplifies integration with other components of Telefónica Deutschland’s OSS in order to align the network with different applications.
The upgraded network uses open standard models, including the transport application programming interface (T-API) and OpenConfig, along with Blue Planet MDSO.
In addition to provisioning the new services and applications, the network upgrade will also help Telefónica Deutschland rivals such as Deutsche Telekom.
RELATED: Ciena sends Blue Planet out on its own
Early last year, Ciena split Blue Planet off as a separate software division away from its hardware division. In Ciena’s third quarter earnings earlier this month, Blue Planet posted revenues of $11.3 million, which was a slight increase from a year ago, but down from the previous quarter’s $15 million.