Orange has completed the migration of the Orange Long-Distance network to a new photonic control plane developed by Nokia.
Orange says the migration, which involved distributing network intelligence to different equipment, was implemented successfully without any impact on Orange’s customers, after several months of preparation. During this time, the entire long-distance network (over 18,000 km and 330 nodes), was simulated.
Orange’s French, European and Asian networks are underpinned by the Nokia 1830 PSS WDM platform, which can transport up to 20 Tbps over long-haul distances. These platforms have now been switched to software-managed operations, allowing the deployment of on-demand activation services and automatic recovery control via Artificial Intelligence technologies if there is an outage.
Jean-Luc Vuillemin, Executive Vice President Orange International Networks Infrastructures & Services, explains: “This progress is a major step in the development of our transmission network, towards quicker and more flexible production of transmission links, automation and the creation of new added-value services for our customers. Orange continues to invest in ultra high-speed infrastructure development to support the development of new uses, such as multimedia content, social networks or the cloud, and to ensure the quality of transmissions whilst controlling costs.”
Sam Bucci, Nokia stated: “The Orange and Nokia teams pooled their skills to respond to growing capacity and time to market challenges. One of the key steps was migration of the existing network software to the control plane, a carefully prepared operation orchestrated by our European teams, with the support and supervision of Orange experts. Our teams continue to work towards greater network automation, which will soon allow Orange customers to access services on demand via a dedicated and secure web portal.”
