South Africa’s Dark Fibre selects Ciena Blue Planet to manage network complexity

Dark Fibre Africa, South Africa’s provider of open-access fibre infrastructure, is deploying Ciena’s Blue Planet orchestration software to automate the delivery of Ethernet services across its existing multi-vendor network and provide more service flexibility and agility for their customers. Dark Fibre Africa will benefit from increased programmability of its network to more efficiently roll out existing services, and be enabled to more rapidly turn up new offerings. Dark Fibre Africa will also leverage Blue Planet to launch its new Magellan suite of Ethernet managed services.

With Ciena’s Blue Planet Multi-Domain Service Orchestration capability, Dark Fibre Africa can automate network and service provisioning, significantly improving service velocity. For example, Dark Fibre Africa will now be able to provision more than 500 new services a month, significantly increasing the number of services it can offer per week; and allow its customers to leverage new, virtualised add-on services. Blue Planet will also help break down management silos across different vendor and technology domains, and reduce operating costs for Dark Fibre Africa.

The introduction of Blue Planet will play a key role in Dark Fibre Africa’s commitment to improving the country’s ICT infrastructure, helping to improve network readiness, increase competition and make high-speed connectivity more affordable. By rolling out a portfolio of new value-added virtualised services with Ciena’s Blue Planet, Network Functions Virtualisation Orchestration capabilities, Dark Fibre Africa’s customers stand to benefit from unparalleled scalability and coverage with access to new on-demand offerings like virtual routing and firewall services, easily accessed via a self-service portal.

“Dark Fibre Africa’s role is to enable access to efficient, effective connectivity. As we expand to provide more Ethernet and virtualised services, we are investing in technologies that help us streamline the process and make this change economical. Ciena’s Blue Planet orchestration solution not only allows us reduce operating expenses and create new revenue opportunities, but its ability to automate solutions over a multi-vendor network allowed us to leverage our existing resources,” Andreas Uys CTO, Dark Fibre Africa

“Service providers must be able to reduce the complexity and time-to-market associated with introducing new services. Ciena’s Blue Planet software introduces more programmability into networks, like that of Dark Fibre Africa, in order to automate the rapid turn up and delivery of new services and truly provide the on-demand services customers require. Crucially with Blue Planet, Dark Fibre Africa is supporting South Africa’s ICT development, building a platform that allows businesses to grow and take advantage of the digital economy,” Virginie Hollebecque, Managing Director for Western Europe and Middle East, Ciena

Dark Fibre Africa finances, builds, installs, manages and maintains a dark fibre network to transmit metro and long-haul telecommunications traffic in South Africa. Dark Fibre Africa has close to 8,000 km of fibre infrastructure nationwide, providing its customers with Ethernet services including high-bandwidth, open-access dark fibre links, hosting, last-mile access, backhaul and long-haul connectivity.

https://youtu.be/vohyzHE3BpU

Dark Fibre Africa is the owner of a carrier-neutral dark fibre infrastructure for the transmission of primarily metro telecommunications traffic. Dark Fibre Africa leases secure transmission and backbone fibre infrastructure to telecommunications operators, Internet service providers, media conglomerates, tertiary education institutions, municipalities, government organizations, and other businesses, large and small, on equal terms. All Dark Fibre Africa’s clients have access to the same dark fibre infrastructure with reliability and capacity.

Blue Planet serves four primary use cases for our customers: multi-domain service orchestration, NFV orchestration, commercial-grade open network operating system, and SDN management and control. It does this on top of a disruptive, next-generation software architecture that leverages open-source technologies, model-driven templates and container-based micro-services. Blue Planet also supports the Ciena V-WAN application for on-demand connectivity services. Any use case or application can be paired with Blue Planet Software Professional Services that let customers looking for additional software expertise complement and support the integration of Blue Planet into their operations and back-offices.