Ericsson to help Telstra introduce SDN, NFV

In a bid to support more cloud and digital services Telstra announced that it is working with telecoms equipment vendor Ericsson to introduce software defined networking and network function virtualisation into the telco’s network.

The agreement, which includes the supply of Ericsson optical transport equipment and services as well as Ciena packet-optical platforms, will see Telstra introduce SDN and NFV capabilities into its core network, which will make the company’s network more flexible and scalable.

“We want to have one of the world’s best optical networks and this agreement will provide us with the ability to dynamically move and shape transport capacity with the flexibility and scalability to streamline our network operations,” said David Robertson, director transport and routing, engineering at Telstra. “This will help us ensure a consistent satisfactory customer experience, despite the demands for high traffic across different parts of the transport network.”

NFV – considered by many to be the “killer app” for SDN – will allow Telstra to reduce its dependence on expensive networking hardware, and make network management more agile and responsive to changes in traffic.

“The continued improvement of Telstra’s optical technology will increase bandwidth capacity and also lower latency which is of growing importance as more and more operations move to the cloud,” Robertson added.

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Håkan Eriksson, head of Ericsson Australia and New Zealand commented: “We have worked with Telstra over a number of years to pilot the latest cloud networking technologies incorporating SDN and NFV. The new agreement with Telstra ensures that we can begin to introduce this functionality into the Telstra transport network throughout Australia.”

The move will also allow Telstra to more effectively compete in the enterprise cloud services space, where competitors like Google and Amazon are building their own SDN switches and creating highly elastic, scalable networks from the ground up.