Accelerate 5G Impact with Itential’s IP Backhaul Automation Solution

The explosive growth of mobile data, and the forecasts for continue growth, are driving Communications Service Providers to invest heavily in their IP backhaul networks. Recently, I’ve covered a few topics around IP backhaul automation such as the components need for automating, key use cases that support its evolution, and the impact that backhaul automation can have in your business. But now, I want to focus on Itential’s unique IP Backhaul Automation solution that was purpose-built to help CSPs accelerate your 5G network creation and operations.

Let’s take a look at Itential’s Cell Site Backhaul Solution and walk through the story of how it was created.

Identifying the Need for Flexibility

I’ve been with Itential for more than six years, and over that time I’ve had the pleasure of working with a number of our Tier 1 Communications Service Provider customers in implementing effective automation strategies – all across a wide range of technologies. It’s been fascinating to see how different organizations approach the same sets of problems.

For example, every Communications Service Provider has to make technical and business decisions on how best to deploy their mobility applications, such as Packet Data Network Gateway (PGW), Serving Gateway (SGW), User Plane Function (UPF) and Session Management Function (SMF). They also need to design the most effective and efficient transport network to carry the mobile traffic from the cell sites and through the mobile core. Given the specificity of the standards associated with 4G and 5G, you’d expect everyone to make the same decisions, perhaps with minor variations such as the choice of vendor.

However, what you find is that there are many other variables that the Communications Service Providers consider when designing and implementing their networks. Some of the deciding factors include the availability of fiber (especially if the wireless provider owns the fiber), spectrum investments virtualization/containerization options, etc.

The impact of this diversity is that many of the Tier 1 providers (and some of the Tier 2 providers) end up implementing solutions that are unique to their business.  While this has the benefit of being custom designed, it also carries with it a large amount of cost and complexity.

Even prior to my time at Itential, my advice to Communications Service Providers has been to select technologies that enable differentiation where it makes sense, but in ways that do not require a bespoke solution. Flexibility is the key here – if a technology choice supports flexibility without incurring cost and technical debt, then it’s worth evaluating. And that is the need that Itential has built our IP Backhaul Automation Solution on.

The Itential IP Backhaul Automation Solution

Last year, one of Itential’s biggest customers used Itential Automation Platform to automate a set of activities on their backhaul network that were necessary for a 5G rollout. The program was a success, enabling them to accelerate their 5G initiative and gain a leadership position in their market. This year, we began working with another Tier 1 Communications Service Provider on a similar initiative. However, this provider not only wanted to automate a few tasks, they wanted to automate the entire lifecycle of their IP backhaul network elements.

While these two providers had number process components in common, they had a different mix of vendors both for their networking equipment (cell site routers and aggregation routers) and they had very different management systems and OSS stacks. However, the fundamental activities they wanted to perform (new device deployment, device upgrade, device configuration compliance, and device configuration change) were the same.

Our team at Itential realized that we could create a backhaul automation solution that addressed those common use cases, and Communications Service Providers could leverage Itential’s integration flexibility and low-code environment to quickly customize the solution for their environment – all without lengthy development cycles and creation of technical debt.

The Itential IP Backhaul Automation Solution includes the Itential Automation Platform with access to Pre-Built Automations for the lifecycle of IP backhaul devices, along with access to a wide variety of adapters for integrating with the existing vendors and OSS infrastructure. This allows customers to begin automating their backhaul immediately and seeing the business impact within just days. In most cases, the automation solution pays for itself in less than six months. A few results our customers are already seeing include:

Itential users can customize the solution in minutes, focus on accelerating their project timelines, and reduce the effort of manually operating their IP backhaul network. Looking forward, Itential is working with these and other Communications Service Providers to further leverage the automation infrastructure to support advanced 5G capabilities such as 5G transport network slicing, hybrid cloud deployments, and Open RAN.

For more information on the Itential IP Backhaul Automation Solution, you can watch the on-demand webinar to see a full demo of the solution in action or download the white paper to take a deep dive into Itential’s approach to IP backhaul automation.