Regional Service Providers

Ciena Insights

Explosive growth in bandwidth demand is requiring urgent investments in capacity expansion. However, long-term investments like network infrastructure are especially risky in today’s rapidly changing environment, as assets may become obsolete before their expected lifecycle ends. This is particularly challenging to smaller providers, who don’t have deep pockets and can’t afford mistakes.

To maximize the longevity of their investments, regional providers need to future-proof their network platforms, ensuring those assets can leverage new services and capabilities that will empower them to succeed on a wide range of competitive scenarios, demands, and requirements.

These are some of the key network platform trends that regional service providers are assessing to evolve their businesses:

• Openness is crucial. Providers realize that change is the only constant, and want to be free to choose new vendors, work with different platforms, and take advantage of non-proprietary software and tools at any time. The time for vendor lock-in is over.
• Network layers are collapsing. Optical, Ethernet, and IP are coming together in more efficient and optimized solutions. Coherent optics are coming to packet boxes, which are adding optimized IP features to respond with more efficiency to the most pressing use-cases.
• Software over a programmable infrastructure is enabling steady progress toward automation. Even small Internet service providers are evolving to increase their operational efficiency and improve customer experience through process and network automation.
• Analytics, advanced telemetry, and predictive capabilities are coming to improve network visibility, performance, and response—bringing AI to support human management.
• Cloud architectures are extending to the WAN. Network orchestration and software-defined architectures provide the flexibility to add new services and empower users. Data Center Interconnect (DCI) architectures are making their way as light-footprint and extremely cost-effective alternatives to high-demand transport network segments.

To thrive on digital disruption, regional service providers need to be able to quickly adapt, becoming more flexible, responsive, and efficient. Ciena’s Adaptive Network™ vision helps regional providers to address these demands and trends.