The trial is taking place within Vodacom South Africa and seeks to determine the DCSG’s performance in live 4G and 5G network environments, as well as its ability to interoperate with Vodacom’s current radio access network (RAN) providers.
This involves using the DCSG to manage commercial traffic in urban, rural and ultra-rural areas.
Beverly Ngwenya, CTO of Vodacom South Africa, said: “We are extremely excited about the potential of the DCSG solution. This promises to broaden our supplier market, expedite the development of new features, reduce capital expenditure and improve operational efficiencies.”
DCSG was developed within TIP’s open optical and packet transport (OOPT) project group, by a sub-group led by Vodafone and Facebook.
The TIP DCSG uses open, standard-based, disaggregated network technologies to target several opportunities in operators’ IP aggregation networks. This includes overall deployment cost reductions and the creation of a more diverse supply chain as well as operational efficiencies from being able to use SDN technologies for network management automation.
Attilio Zani (pictured), executive director of TIP, said: “Vodacom is a pioneer in the adoption of TIP’s DCSG technology in Africa and we are very pleased that they are proceeding with commercial trials of the solution. We believe that the success of these trials will showcase the commercial viability of DCSG for large scale commercial deployments not only in South Africa but in other markets as well, and demonstrate the case for how new solutions can significantly improve the quality of connectivity.”
