Time Is Money: Changing the Service Operational Paradigm with Infinera Instant Bandwidth – Part II
By Fady Masoud
Product Marketing
In Part I of this blog series, we discussed how Infinera solves communication service providers’ (CSPs) challenges with Instant Bandwidth, enabling software activation of service-ready optical capacity in minutes and taking service automation to a whole new level. We also touched on how Instant Bandwidth is a true game-changer from both business and operational perspectives. It enables a perfect match between the timing of capital expenditure (CapEx) and service revenue, thus accelerating time to revenue from month to minutes, and it also reduces operational expenditure (OpEx) by streamlining operations and eliminating truck rolls.
In this post, we’ll highlight how service providers can leverage the Infinera Instant Bandwidth solutions in a wide variety of applications to accelerate service turn-up, reduce costs and maximize return on investment (ROI). These applications include:
- Network expansion: Instant Bandwidth allows CSPs to quickly expand network coverage into other geographical areas. The fast activation of additional capacity reduces OpEx and accelerates time to completion while avoiding capital lock-in (i.e. an influx of capital while waiting for a project to be completed).
- Network maintenance: CSPs can leverage Instant Bandwidth features such as transferable licenses to route traffic over different spans during maintenance periods. This leads to maximum ROI by activating capacity on backup routes, thus eliminating the need for excess capital investment for capacity that will only be used for a short period of time, as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Transferable Licenses for Network Maintenance - Seasonal capacity spikes: Instant Bandwidth’s features quickly provide additional capacity for seasonal, planned or unplanned spikes in traffic demand (summer festivals, major sporting events, etc.). Instant Bandwidth License Pools and transferable licenses ensure quick turnaround for capacity activation and lower operating costs by eliminating truck rolls and on-site provisioning visits, as shown in Figure 2, while avoiding capital lock-in for temporary capacity requirements.
Figure 2: Seasonal Capacity Spikes with Instant Bandwidth - Ethernet business services: The remote, easy, fast activation of Ethernet services to enterprise customers enabled by Instant Bandwidth allows CSPs to leverage service velocity as a competitive edge, while achieving higher service revenue due to faster activation, resulting in shorter time to revenue.
- Data center interconnect (DCI) as a service: CSPs can use Instant Bandwidth’s transferable licenses to remotely increase capacity for DCI services based on the time of day or application requirements. Fast, remote in-service bandwidth increases require no truck rolls, and the ability to reuse bandwidth licenses for other requests allows CSPs to maximize ROI and reduce CapEx and OpEx, as shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3: Dynamic DCI Based on Time of Day - Infrastructure for emerging technologies: The network impact of new bandwidth-hungry technologies such as fiber to the home and 5G is often difficult to predict. CSPs can leverage the capabilities of Instant Bandwidth to deploy a forecast-tolerant infrastructure that supports the deployment of these technologies across their lifecycles, from controlled field trials to limited geographical coverage to full deployment. Instant Bandwidth enables CSPs to provide the right amount of capacity without network overbuilds while minimizing the business risks associated with deploying new technologies, like avoiding early or excessive CapEx and OpEx. Transferable licenses provide the flexibility to switch capacity from one test area to another, thus increasing a CSP’s ROI.
Part III of this blog series will feature a Q&A session with the Chief Technology Officer of one of the major CSPs with network operations and coverage that span Europe and North America. He will describe how they use the Infinera Instant Bandwidth solution to accelerate service turn-up and streamline operations. Stay tuned for Part III.