Coming recently from being named as the only African
brand to make it to the global top 100 brands, MTN Nigeria has become the first
African operator to deploy groundbreaking SSR 8020 platform for wireless IP
core network SSR 8020 that supports significantly more subscribers from a
single Evolved Packet Gateway (EPG) than competing nodes on the market. This
deployment will enable MTN to efficiently meet rapidly increasing demand for
data services.
As Africa's biggest operator, MTN Nigeria will boost
its ability to serve subscribers and their growing data needs, with the
deployment of Ericsson's latest wireless packet core network technology. The
Smart Services Router (SSR) 8020 platform allows operators to introduce newer,
smarter functions and capabilities to enhance the mobile broadband experience
for end users.
With over 120 million mobile subscriptions overall,
Nigeria is the largest and one of the fastest growing telecoms market in
Africa. Data traffic growth in Nigeria was 100 percent last year and the demand
for mobile broadband is not slowing down as internet services are becoming
increasingly essential for more and more facets of people's lives.
MTN hosts over 42 million of those subscribers (about
50% of the market according to latest NCC data), and the company has always
worked to meet, and exceed the expectations of its subscribers by improving the
quality of its service through a very aggressive network roll out and
optimization strategy.
The SSR has a backplane capacity of up to 16 Tbps,
state-of-the-art signaling capacities, an easy-to-use administrative interface,
and sophisticated availability and resilience capabilities. The router will
support the current 2G, 3G, and Wi-Fi networks of MTN Nigeria, plus will also
be able to support future upgrades to LTE. This ability to support all the different
types of access networks brings significant cost savings to operators because
fewer nodes with high scalability can efficiently handle the network bandwidth
growth.
The EPG (Evolved Packet Gateway) application has the
capabilities to support 2G, 3G and 4G and the rapid increase in demand for IP
data services. This deal also includes deployment of the End-to-End Quality of
Service solution in order to offer more innovative mobile broadband products.
Lynda Saint-Nwafor, CTO of MTN Nigeria, says: "Deploying
this platform will make our network more efficient and scalable to cater for
the growing data demands of our subscribers."
Lars Lindén, head of Ericsson Sub-Saharan Africa,
says: "The flexibility and capacity of the SSR platform will allow MTN Nigeria
to introduce newer, smarter functions and capabilities which will enhance the
mobile broadband experience for end users." This includes traffic
management capabilities for quality of service differentiation and improved
operator billing and rating options.
Ericsson service professionals will provide turnkey
services including installation, integration and commissioning of the new SSR
8020 platform as well as support services. MTN will deploy the Evolved Packet
Gateway on SSR 8020 by the end of 2012.
The Ericsson SSR 8000 family of
Smart Services Routers provides operators with a highly scalable, consolidated
platform that offers services for both fixed and mobile network infrastructure.
It offers services such as IP/MPLS (internet protocol/Multi-Protocol Label Switching) edge routing, and Evolved Packet
Gateway functionalities. The Smart Services Router enables complete network
convergence so subscribers can access services from any devices or locations.
MPLS is now the
de-facto standard for many carrier and service provider networks and its
deployment scenarios continue to grow.
The unique thing about this platform is that MPLS works by tagging the traffic, in this example packets,
with an identifier (a label) to distinguish the LSPs (Label Switched Paths).
When a packet is received, the router uses this label (and sometimes also the
link over which it was received) to identify the LSP. It then looks up the LSP
in its own forwarding table to determine the best link over which to forward
the packet, and the label to use on this next hop.
ACG Research conducted an analysis
of the sources of growth in control plane traffic: increases in end-user
connections, device types, apps, app policy and control requirements, and
mobility management requirements. This study projects data and control plane
traffic growth at a typical packet core node and analyzes the scalability of
the SSR 8020 IP service delivery platform and of a competing service router
when configured to serve this traffic growth. The study finds that the SSR 8020
has lower total cost of ownership (TCO) by 66 percent and higher scalability by
two to more than three times that of the competitor’s service router.
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