The company, which also has 10 million mobile customers and operates 10 million Wifi points, says network functions virtualisation (NFV) will help it achieve high-performance and cost-effective scale in support of voice, video and data services for its residential and business customers.
“While our first NFV deployment is for virtual route reflection, we are also evaluating the vMX to rapidly add network capacity and new customers,” said Andy Grotzke, Liberty Global’s vice president for core network strategy and engineering.
The vMX is a virtual route reflector from Juniper Networks that Liberty Global is using in its network. “The ability to leverage a broad set of virtual routing capabilities is very important to Liberty Global as it will enable agile service innovation and increased operational efficiency,” Grotzke said.
The company said that virtual route reflection provides efficient scale in large border gateway protocol networks, helping it streamline operations and reduce total cost of ownership. Liberty Global is an existing Juniper Networks customer and deploys Juniper’s high-performance routing, switching and security solutions at various locations in its network.
Paul Obsitnik, vice president for portfolio marketing at Juniper Networks, said: “Virtualised network services are a key technology in the transformation to agility. Juniper’s high-performance virtualisation technologies enable Liberty Global to deploy new services and products quickly and easily.”
Liberty Global owns Unity Media in Germany, Telenet in Belgium, Virgin Media in the UK and Ireland and UPC in central and eastern Europe. Its LiLAC group owns Cable & Wireless Communications in the Caribbean, Liberty in Puerto Rico and VTR in Chile.
