Bell Canada’s Transformation Journey with Routed Optical Networking

Service suppliers worldwide are turning to Routed Optical Networking to make their infrastructure less complicated and extra cost-efficient to function, fast-track the supply of recent companies, and add extra capability to maintain up with rising buyer demand. It’s a game-changer, fully redefining the economics of networking by decreasing TCO by as much as 45% and dramatically simplifying operations. I sat down with Marc-André Gilbert, Senior Supervisor of Transport Planning at Bell Canada, to listen to concerning the firm’s community transformation journey utilizing Routed Optical Networking and the way it will allow Bell Canada to be the most effective community in Canada whereas additionally considerably decreasing prices.

You’re beginning to deploy Routed Optical Networking throughout your infrastructure. Inform us what’s driving this transformation.

We wish to be Canada’s greatest community—it’s our strategic crucial to ship the most effective service and expertise for our prospects. Nevertheless, with a legacy infrastructure, that’s simpler stated than achieved! We wish to modernize our community to make it extra environment friendly, in order that we’ll have the agility to develop our enterprise by differentiated companies, whereas managing main industry-wide challenges, equivalent to lowering margins and ARPU. We’ve a really wholesome enterprise—with our dividends rising by 5% for the previous 16 years—however this community transformation with Routed Optical Networking will assist us strengthen our monetary well being additional and generate extra worth for our shareholders. We’ve calculated that it’ll allow us to save lots of 125 million Canadian {dollars} over the subsequent ten years, with an round 27% discount in CapEx. The CapEx financial savings will greater than double once we use Routed Optical Networking straight over darkish fibers.

How precisely does Routed Optical Networking help your strategic crucial to be the most effective community in Canada? How will it allow you to supply the most effective service on the lowest worth and make your organization extra aggressive?

Each our residential and enterprise prospects’ bandwidth wants proceed to develop, and functions like IoT are creating new calls for for low-latency connectivity. With Routed Optical Networking, we could have the flexibleness to fulfill these wants with a extra scalable infrastructure that can enable us to ship new fastened and wi-fi companies extra cost-effectively. Changing huge, power-hungry transponders with tiny pluggable optics and converging IP and optical layers permits us to rethink the economics of networking and transfer as much as 400G and past a lot quicker than our opponents.

Finally, Routed Optical Networking is the underlay that permits the monetization of the service overlay. Nonetheless, it couldn’t have been straightforward to persuade everybody at Bell Canada {that a} community transformation of this magnitude can be the proper factor to do. How did you handle that?

Simply assume, it’s been nearly 150 years since Alexander Graham Bell patented the primary sensible phone. That’s the legacy that Bell Canada is constructed on, and Routed Optical Networking is about remodeling these very foundations of our enterprise. But it surely’s not innovation for innovation’s sake. It’s about constructing on that legacy of innovation and making our enterprise prepared for the long run.

However change is rarely straightforward, and on condition that Routed Optical Networking is about IP and optical convergence, it was essential that we bought the buy-in from each our IP and optical groups. Whereas their remits are completely different, they each need what’s greatest for our prospects and our enterprise. So, we regarded on the capability of various routers collectively and in contrast that to what we have been deploying within the optical discipline. The distinction in capability was large—terabits versus megabits. We then checked out ZR pluggable coherent optics, and the way they might give us 400G throughput as a substitute of us having to depend on devoted line playing cards or transceivers, and the built-in performance, cost-efficiency, and decrease energy consumption of an optical transceiver module. The IP staff thought that convergence can be a routing nightmare, however following checks in our lab with the Cisco staff, they have been offered on the advantages of Routed Optical Networking, too. The truth is, each groups are actually the most important advocates for it.

After getting the buy-in of senior administration and your technical groups, you are actually deploying the know-how. Inform us about that and the way you will operationalize this new infrastructure.

We’ll roll out Routed Optical Networking over three years throughout our complete infrastructure, beginning with a deployment program for next-generation edge websites this 12 months. We’re constructing it hop-by-hop over a legacy fastened infrastructure, and due to Routed Optical Networking, the operation of this infrastructure will likely be a lot less complicated. To place this into perspective, we used to have an IP planner, a transport planner, and an entry planner deployments within the discipline, and several other completely different community operations facilities. Simply think about the complexity of managing an outage, for instance, with main and secondary non-public strains, transponders, and wavelengths, and hundreds of kilometers between them and aggregation routers. Within the occasion of a fiber lower, it was extremely troublesome and time consuming to pinpoint which line system was affected. With all the pieces converged utilizing Routed Optical Networking, we will troubleshoot instantly, simply repair any affected optics, and, within the meantime, use alternate paths to divert visitors to attenuate impacts on end-user expertise.

That goes again to what you stated earlier about having the most effective community in Canada and creating shareholder worth, too. Outages can simply result in buyer attrition, so a supplier’s status and income rely on flawless end-user experiences. Routed Optical Networking will make your infrastructure extra sustainable, due to its energy and area financial savings, supporting your journey to internet zero emissions.

Completely! We estimate that it’ll allow us to cut back the area and energy consumption of our community by a staggering 76%. Simplicity, scalability, financial savings, and sustainability—Routed Optical Networking could have a far-reaching optimistic influence on our enterprise. That’s the reason I might encourage my friends in different CSPs to discover remodeling their infrastructure on this means, too. Make the case for it together with your technical groups and your senior management. It can repay.

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