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Virginie Hollebecque,
Vice President and
Managing Director for
Western Europe and
Middle East at Ciena
journey. Each provider will have a different
starting point, depending upon their current
network infrastructure, market dynamics and
business objectives.
Technology principles that underpin
an adaptive network
Evolving toward an adaptive network
should not be undertaken without a full
understanding of the technology principles
that underpin this type of network evolution.
Vendors need to prove they are committed
to ensuring the operation and customer
experience of the adaptive network by
providing solutions based on openness,
security and scalability.
Openness is critical in the adaptive network
to allow network providers choices in the
products and technologies they can deploy
to enable their network evolution.
Providers that embrace openness will be
able to select the technology solutions
that best meet their needs in terms of
operational fit, performance, power
consumption and telemetry, resulting
in dramatically lower costs, increased
agility, simpler scalability, and a network
architecture that is highly flexible, to take
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advantage of future innovations that may
not be apparent today.
Security is paramount in the adaptive
network to ensure it can remain responsive,
flexible and adaptive to changing market
dynamics. Network providers must consider
the following security requirements as they
evolve their networks:
• Ability to secure and protect the
exponential growth in data traffic over
the network
• Increased levels of automation and
fewer manual processes require greater
security measures to detect and mitigate
security breaches
• More open, best-of-breed environments
must be governed by security protocols
to ensure the protection of data across
heterogeneous networks
Scalability in the adaptive network is
required, as mobile device proliferation,
streaming video, cloud computing, IoT
and the evolution to 5G will all put massive
pressure on network capacity. Meeting
the demand will require network capacity
increases in orders of magnitude, as well as
the need to respond to unpredictability in
traffic patterns.
The adaptive network must scale from both
capacity and operational perspectives,
transporting maximum capacity using
minimal equipment to get the most
efficiency from fibre assets, and using
software-based control to offer the ability to
automate processes and adjust bandwidth
in real time to meet changing customer and
traffic requirements.
A focus on services
The ever-increasing expectations of users
– and the technology breakthroughs that
continue to feed them – have created
an unprecedented level of pressure and
complexity for today’s network providers.
Some strategic approaches suggest that
complexity is the enemy and that a fully
automated network is the answer.
With the adaptive network framework in
place the network operator can focus on
providing services and service levels that
differentiate against less agile rivals.
The evolution of the adaptive network is only
just beginning though. With some market
commentators already talking about 6G, it
is easy to see that the network evolution will
run and run. n
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