Telecom operators around the world are looking for new markets as the saturation point in their home-base inches ever closer to 100 percent. Competing outside their market requires deploying the latest technology while offering better value and comparable price points. One of Russia's largest national telecom operators, Rostelecom, covers more than 34 million households within the country, as well as Europe, with a wide range of telecommunication solutions. As the company looks to expand nationally and in the European market, it is upgrading its technology by offering software-defined networks (SDN) and virtualization networking functions (NFV).
With NFV network architecture, operators can virtualize network node functions into building blocks to create communication services. It provides a new way to design, deploy and manage network services so network functions can be decoupled from propriety hardware appliances so they can run in software.
This reduces capital and operating expenditures by reducing the need to purchase purpose-built hardware and reducing the space, power and cooling requirements of equipment. This means companies can adopt pay-as-you-go models without having to roll out and manage network services.
Software-Defined Networking also makes the network much smarter by allowing for better optimization than traditional systems. It lets network administrators shape traffic and deploy services to meet the needs of the organization without having to manually adjust individual switches or routers in the forwarding plane.
Both technologies will deliver agility and flexibility so companies can scale up or down services to address changing demands and introduce new products to market faster with new types of applications, services and business models.
"I believe that SDN and NFV technology will significantly reduce capital costs and accelerate the launch of new services," said Edward Vasilenko, Rostelecom Technical Strategy Director.
According to the company, it is looking to simplify the introduction of new solution across all its market by reducing design complexity, making new technologies available and providing new services.
Rostelecom is the largest broadband and pay-TV markets in Russia with more than 10.6 million fixed-line broadband subscribers and over 7.5 million pay-TV subscribers. It also provides telecommunications services to government bodies and enterprises of all levels with solution for industries in medicine, E-Government, cloud computing, education, security, housing and utility services.
