Over the past year, two topics have consistently surfaced in my discussions with executives from across the telecom industry – the first is an increased focus on improving sustainability, and the second is operators’ acute need to accelerate the return on their massive 5G investments. I am excited to share that we will be demonstrating several state-of-the-art 5G automation solutions to these issues at MWC Barcelona 2024 - which you can see when you visit Blue Planet at the Ciena booth (Hall 2, stand #2J51).

Blue Planet blazes the trail to 5G monetization and sustainability

Let’s start with sustainability. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is a strategic priority for most network operators, and they are actively investigating and implementing technologies that reduce their carbon footprint. To help operators realize these goals, Blue Planet will be demonstrating its Network Planning and Deployment solution, which streamlines and optimizes 5G build-outs.

The vendor-agnostic solution automates all 5G RAN planning, design, and deployment processes, including complete lifecycle automation for virtualized resources deployed within and across data centers and public clouds like AWS and Microsoft Azure. Among many other benefits, the solution leverages zero-touch provisioning (ZTP) to eliminate truck rolls and provides operators with an investment-protecting evolutionary path that helps them move from over-provisioned traditional hardware-centric RANs to modern vRAN and Open RAN architectures that are highly efficient at any scale.

From a 5G monetization perspective, while network operators have had considerable success providing high-bandwidth 5G connectivity to video-hungry mobile consumers, they have had difficulty penetrating the more lucrative enterprise market. That is because large businesses require services that are fine-tuned to meet the needs of specific applications while adhering to service level agreements (SLAs).

Meeting these enterprise needs requires end-to-end 5G network slicing across the RAN, transport, and 5G Core and cloud domains. However, this is all but impossible in traditional operations environments that rely on highly customized OSS and manual intervention.

MWC attendees will see how our 3GPP-compliant 5G Network Slicing solution enables high-value, on-demand slice-based services at carrier scale by automating the entire network slice lifecycle. The solution includes cutting-edge multi-cloud orchestration capabilities that ensure slice performance by dynamically instantiating and activating slice resources at edge locations nearest the customer and also let operators easily enhance their service offers with cloud-hosted partner applications.

In addition, the solution helps operators overcome slicing complexity in multi-vendor RANs with a built-in vendor-agnostic RAN domain orchestrator, which also provides comprehensive service management and orchestration (SMO) for emerging Open RAN deployments.

Blue Planet blazes the trail to 5G monetization and sustainabilityImportantly, the solution monitors end-to-end 5G network slices in real-time and collects and processes telemetry data from across the 5G infrastructure to track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and ensure that customer SLAs are being met. In addition to localizing SLA violations to individual slices, cell sites, and customers and visualizing the end-to-end network slice topology with overlayed KPIs, Blue Planet applies machine learning and automation to correlate service alarms with the underlying network issues to help operators rapidly isolate issues and efficiently identify root causes.

To quantify the value of network slice automation in your specific use case, check out our new 5G Network Slicing Calculator. Simply select the number of slices you plan to create, and you will be able to contrast the potential slicing OPEX in a traditional environment versus the Blue Planet automated network slicing solution; you can also receive a customized report that provides more details for you to consider.

Blue Planet is helping network operators worldwide achieve their business goals, and I’m proud to be demonstrating our world-class solutions at MWC Barcelona 2024. Please take a moment to schedule time to meet with our executives, discuss your 5G goals, and attend an expert-led demo.

Safe travels, and I look forward to seeing you there.