Tele Columbus is creating a Converged Interconnect Network (CIN) based on Juniper's Cloud Metro infrastructure and NEC's xHaul conversion service to converge all of its services onto one high-performance platform.
Tele Columbus currently reaches more than 3 million homes. As a full-service partner to municipalities and regional utilities, the company actively supports the expansion of fiber optic infrastructure and broadband Internet in Germany. In order to remain profitable, relevant and differentiated in an evolving, competitive market, the provider decided to move from its existing network architecture to an open architecture for flexibility, greater agility, optimized quality of user experience, and significantly higher return on investment (ROI) and total cost of ownership.
Following consultation and comprehensive validation led by the NEC 5G Transport Network Center of Excellence (CoE) in EMEA, Juniper's Cloud Metro solution was selected to create a CIN that enables all consumer and enterprise services to be managed and delivered more cost-effectively from a single infrastructure .
Sustainable future expansion was a key consideration. Juniper's ACX7000 family of products was selected for its port speed options that help customers grow in place as capacity needs increase, allowing for easy transition from 100G to 400G with different fiber options.
NEC is offering xHaul conversion services tailored to meet the business needs of Tele Columbus. These services are based on its CoE's global telecommunications expertise, combined with Tele Columbus' local engineering support throughout the design, deployment and operation process, including training and optimization efforts to ensure that the introduction of the new platform improves their quality of service and competitiveness.
The network build-out and service migration will take place in phases. The initial phases of the data center, network core and metro network are underway, with the first round of users scheduled to be connected in the first half of this year. Ongoing phases will follow, leading to a complete, carefully managed migration to cloud metro, including automation over time to improve operational efficiency.
As elsewhere, users in Germany are already focusing on performance, scalability and reliability of digital services, as these will become more important differentiators in the future," said Michael Fränkle, Chief Technology Officer at Tele Columbus. To meet these expectations in the context of exponential data growth, we are leading the way in transforming our technology platform and, in doing so, shaping our business for the future. The Cloud Metro solution, Juniper and NEC partnership and thoughtful local support meet our needs and demonstrate to us the value of simplicity, innovation and open, multi-vendor principles."
Brendan Gibbs, senior vice president of automated WAN solutions at Juniper Networks, added: "Juniper Networks is pleased to have been selected by Tele Columbus as a new strategic vendor to work with our global alliance partner, NEC. The business strategy driving Tele Columbus' network transformation confirms that the traditional, device-centric, 'retro metro' network solution is no longer relevant. Our Cloud Metro solution is uniquely designed to overcome the overlapping pressures of service scalability, user experience requirements, environmental considerations and operational cost efficiencies faced by today's service providers."
Hideyuki Ogata, General Manager of NEC's Service Provider Solutions Division, concluded, "NEC is proud to work closely with Juniper Networks to contribute to the transformation journey of Tele Columbus. The validation of Juniper's Cloud Metro in our CoE labs proved that it is a robust, scalable and sustainable solution and is one of the key pillars of NEC's xHaul transformation services to innovate our customers' next generation transport networks."
