Achieving fixed network costs for carrier networks
Telecoms attention is transferring to the fixed network, which has to handle the data generated by 5G networks and needs to deal with the existing, increasing connection that is presented at the network edge by fibre access networks.
There is much of the so-called ‘mobile’ data that travels to and from smartphones and arrives via Wi-Fi and the fixed network. Nearly all the data going to and from PCs and laptops arrive in the same way. However, up until now, little has been mentioned about how operators plan to transform wired access edge, to ensure flexible, reduced cost, next generation services for customers on the end of a fixed Wi-Fi link.
Low latency services can’t just be reserved for 5G subscribers. The majority of big operators have huge numbers of customers on the end of Wi-Fi links that are not just in homes. Businesses use of indoor Wi-Fi networks is large and growing, with new Wi-Fi standards and new assignments for spectrum on the way to support many businesses in private, on-premises network plans. Wi-Fi gets huge contiguous spectrum assignment from the FCC).
Customers will likely demand that next generation services become available over both fixed and mobile services. In a response to this, one supplier, RtBrick is preparing what it has labelled a makeover for the carrier network.
The company is pioneering the idea of a web-scale network for telecom operators, meaning that carriers flowing through disaggregation of hardware and software, with silicon hardware, providing a lower cost physical processing base and FullStack routing to run the resulting IP/MPLS infrastructure.
“We realised that the huge ‘cloud-native’ IT companies can run their operations at lower cost and with more agility than telecoms operators have ever been able to,” said Hannes Gredler, founder and chief technology officer at RtBrick, “so we took a similar approach to building IP networks. We wanted to transform networks from carrier-grade to web-scale… with an emphasis on automation.”
RtBrick’s Broadband Network Gateway (BNG) has already been chosen for trials with major telecoms operators. The initial release includes the support for main subscriber features like queuing, accounting and lawful-intercept, and major routing protocols, such as BGP, OSPF and IS-IS. The software is delivered as a container, which runs on Linux, which only includes the microservices required for individual use-cases.
Discover more about RtBrick’s innovative software solution from VP of Marketing, Richard Brandon. Exclusive interview, coming soon.