OneConnect is designed to introduce greater programmability and advanced virtualisation features for WANs as well as greater policy-based control across the network.
Ciena claims that by deploying OneConnect, carriers can benefit from more than 40% bandwidth savings for service restoration, up to 30% latency reduction in highly meshed networks, and new differentiated service offerings including secure optical virtual private networks.
In Infonetics Research’s annual survey of optical equipment vendors, 60% of 18 service provider respondents rated control plane and protection as an important feature, ranking above cost efficiency.
“The market is coming to understand that the two aren’t divorced, the control plane greatly simplifies the operation of your network and greatly improves the efficiency of your network and hence you’re getting big cost improvements,” Mervyn Kelly, EMEA marketing director at Ciena told Capacity.
The findings are also supported by comments from Ron Kline, principal analyst at Ovum, who anticipates a growing carrier interest in new control plane functionality. “Extending control plane functionality to the network edge and adding policy-based programming control substantially increases an operator’s ability to differentiate and create new services to monetise network assets. Therefore, we anticipate growing interest in such features.”
Ciena said more than 15 Tier 1 service providers utilise its control plane technology, as well as regional operators and global enterprises.
