Open Fiber Chooses Italtel for Network Automation

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Italtel, alongside Maticmind, today announced it completed a pioneering network automation project to automatically configure network services for Open Fiber, the wholesale-only FTTH Italian operator, which expects to reach around 19 million property units in Italy with FTTH ultra-broadband in the upcoming years.

Open Fiber has chosen the innovative Cisco Network Services Orchestrator (NSO) platform to automate and simplify its massive operations and provide services in a faster and easier way through network automation. The deployment will allow it to add, modify and delete services automatically without interrupting the overall service and will guarantee real-time activations.

Italtel, which was the first company in Italy to be certified on Cisco NSO technology, designed Open Fiber IP Backbone and has been playing an essential role in analyzing Open Fiber's needs, designing network services and the related automation leveraging on the programmable Cisco NSO platform. The platform operates on all network layers, ranging from access to IP and Optical transport one.

"Open Fiber is now able to deliver wholesale services on a very large scale, significantly reducing the time-to-market of new services and minimizing the configuration errors," said Domenico Angotti, Head of Engineering at Open Fiber. "Cisco's Network Orchestrator greatly supports us for the end-to-end operation of the equipment and the supervision of the activation cycles, allowing to mainly focus our effort on developing innovative customer services, thus increasing efficiency and reducing complexity and operating costs. We are particularly satisfied with this and what has been achieved with the valuable contribution of Italtel and Maticmind in terms of professional competence, response and commitment to the common objectives of the project."

The project of the network automation has developed automated workflows that capture the work order from the Customer Relations Manager (CRM) and activate it in a heterogeneous multi-vendor network, consisting of FTTH access, IP and Optical Transport Network.

"For this project, which is particularly complex due to the heterogeneity of the network, Italtel has drawn on its undisputed strength, which is the ability to make different technologies interact with each other," said Paolo Allegra, Head of Product/Solution Unit Infrastructure Integration at Italtel. "We have dedicated a specific task force to design the IP Backbone, network services and automation activities on the innovative Cisco NSO technology, of which we are certified providers."

The NSO-based network orchestration project is part of the broader network automation program which, by using Software Defined Network (SDN) and in the future NFV-MANO (Network Functions Virtualization Management and Orchestration) paradigms, defines the infrastructure of the virtualized network, which is managed by a special orchestration platform (NFVO).

Open Fiber is the first wholesale operator in Italy - and one of the few in the world - to use NSO throughout the chain of configuration and activation of the service (CRM, Order Manager, Resource Facing System, Network).

Italtel is a multinational company that operates in the ICT sector with a strong focus on innovation. Together with Exprivia, which recently acquired Italtel's controlling shareholding, it constitutes a new large Italian ICT group that intends to be a leader in digital transformation. More