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 latest companies, and add extra capability to maintain up with rising buyer demand. It’s a game-changer, utterly 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 might be 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 accomplished! We wish to modernize our community to make it extra environment friendly, in order that we’ll have the agility to develop our enterprise via differentiated companies, whereas managing main industry-wide challenges, reminiscent of lowering margins and ARPU. We now have 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 now have calculated that it’ll allow us to avoid wasting 125 million Canadian {dollars} over the subsequent ten years, with an round 27% discount in CapEx. The CapEx financial savings will greater than double after we use Routed Optical Networking instantly over darkish fibers.

How precisely does Routed Optical Networking assist 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 purposes like IoT are creating new calls for for low-latency connectivity. With Routed Optical Networking, we can have the pliability to satisfy these wants with a extra scalable infrastructure that may permit us to ship new mounted and wi-fi companies extra cost-effectively. Changing massive, 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 sooner than our opponents.

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

Simply suppose, 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 reworking 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 longer term.

However change is rarely simple, and on condition that Routed Optical Networking is about IP and optical convergence, it was essential that we obtained 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 appeared on the capability of various routers collectively and in contrast that to what we have been deploying within the optical area. The distinction in capability was big—terabits versus megabits. We then checked out ZR pluggable coherent optics, and the way they may 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 group thought that convergence can be a routing nightmare, however following exams in our lab with the Cisco group, they have been offered on the advantages of Routed Optical Networking, too. In reality, 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’re going to operationalize this new infrastructure.

We are going to roll out Routed Optical Networking over three years throughout our entire infrastructure, beginning with a deployment program for next-generation edge websites this yr. We’re constructing it hop-by-hop over a legacy mounted infrastructure, and because of Routed Optical Networking, the operation of this infrastructure can 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 area, and several other completely different community operations facilities. Simply think about the complexity of managing an outage, for instance, with major and secondary non-public traces, transponders, and wavelengths, and 1000’s of kilometers between them and aggregation routers. Within the occasion of a fiber reduce, it was once extremely troublesome and time consuming to pinpoint which line system was affected. With all the things converged utilizing Routed Optical Networking, we can troubleshoot instantly, simply repair any affected optics, and, within the meantime, use alternate paths to divert site visitors to reduce 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 can have a far-reaching optimistic influence on our enterprise. That’s the reason I might encourage my friends in different CSPs to discover reworking their infrastructure on this method, too. Make the case for it together with your technical groups and your senior management. It can repay.

Share: