With operators in Asia Pacific forecast to spend 64% of their capex on 5G now through 2025, many are looking for ways to reduce cost and effort managing their legacy infrastructure while planning how to modernize.  

Modernizing your network can help protect your margins, enhance your customer experiences, and stay ahead of your competition. Modernizing your environment can also help you deliver far more bandwidth at the network edge – right where you need it to support 5G applications, IoT and consumer apps such as gaming, music and video streaming.

Even though there’s a lot to gain from prioritizing network modernization, there are also challenges that might be getting in your way. First, operators often find that network transformation requires specialist skills they don’t have in house. Also, many operators’ internal resources are already stretched with day-to-day operational tasks and would struggle to add a transformation project to their daily workloads.

Network operators often find that network transformation requires specialist skills they don’t have in house.

With these kinds of barriers and constraints to deal with, a trusted network partner can help you modernize your environment. In my last blog I covered how Ciena Services fits this role.

Ciena Services: Ready to modernize your network?

As seen in our recent announcement on new products and capabilities for 5G, Ciena’s team of services experts recognizes that every operator has a different starting point on the journey to 5G. With Ciena’s 25 years of experience building the world’s most advanced networks, we apply best practices and processes learned from R&D and the field – along with the most effective tools for handling network complexities. Ciena’s services team works with you from initial strategy consultation through to implementation and ongoing maintenance to ensure you can succeed at all stages of the 4G to 5G journey. 

What does modernizing your network with Ciena Services look like?

Laying the right foundations

In the first three phases of our approach, we lay the foundations for your modernization project with Consulting, Discovery, and Planning. We prepare your environment for migration by transforming all your data into a universal scheme, visualizing your legacy network assets and traffic flows, and deciding which groups of circuits can be migrated together to deliver the greatest return on investment (ROI).

Delivering a low-risk migration to your modernized network

In the final two phases of our modernization services offer – Execution and Closure – we conduct pre-migration testing to ensure that the target architecture is ready to support your circuits and traffic. We then assess and implement automation options, e.g. using Blue Planet software solutions or automated scripts, for fast, error-free migration to your new environment. After that activity is complete, we conduct post-migration testing to confirm successful implementation and that end customer traffic is as expected.

Ready to modernize your network? Check out our Ciena Services resource page for more details.