Bell Canada’s Transformation Journey with Routed Optical Networking

Service providers worldwide are turning to Routed Optical Networking to make their infrastructure simpler and more cost-efficient to operate, fast-track the delivery of new services, and add more capacity to keep up with growing customer demand. It’s a game-changer, completely redefining the economics of networking by lowering TCO by up to 45% and dramatically simplifying operations. I sat down with Marc-André Gilbert, Senior Manager of Transport Planning at Bell Canada, to hear about the company’s network transformation journey using Routed Optical Networking and how it will enable Bell Canada to be the best network in Canada while also significantly reducing costs.

You are starting to deploy Routed Optical Networking across your infrastructure. Tell us what’s driving this transformation.

We want to be Canada’s best network—it is our strategic imperative to deliver the best service and experience for our customers. However, with a legacy infrastructure, that’s easier said than done! We want to modernize our network to make it more efficient, so that we’ll have the agility to grow our business through differentiated services, while managing major industry-wide challenges, such as decreasing margins and ARPU. We have a very healthy business—with our dividends growing by 5% for the past 16 years—but this network transformation with Routed Optical Networking will help us strengthen our financial health further and generate more value for our shareholders. We have calculated that it will enable us to save 125 million Canadian dollars over the next ten years, with an around 27% reduction in CapEx. The CapEx savings will more than double when we use Routed Optical Networking directly over dark fibers.

How exactly does Routed Optical Networking support your strategic imperative to be the best network in Canada? How will it enable you to offer the best service at the lowest price and make your company more competitive?

Both our residential and business customers’ bandwidth needs continue to grow, and applications like IoT are creating new demands for low-latency connectivity. With Routed Optical Networking, we will have the flexibility to meet those needs with a more scalable infrastructure that will allow us to deliver new fixed and wireless services more cost-effectively. Replacing big, power-hungry transponders with tiny pluggable optics and converging IP and optical layers enables us to rethink the economics of networking and move up to 400G and beyond much faster than our competitors.

Ultimately, Routed Optical Networking is the underlay that enables the monetization of the service overlay. Still, it couldn’t have been easy to convince everyone at Bell Canada that a network transformation of this magnitude would be the right thing to do. How did you manage that?

Just think, it’s been almost 150 years since Alexander Graham Bell patented the first practical telephone. That is the legacy that Bell Canada is built on, and Routed Optical Networking is about transforming those very foundations of our business. But it’s not innovation for innovation’s sake. It’s about building on that legacy of innovation and making our business ready for the future.

But change is never easy, and given that Routed Optical Networking is about IP and optical convergence, it was crucial that we got the buy-in from both our IP and optical teams. While their remits are different, they both want what’s best for our customers and our business. So, we looked at the capacity of different routers together and compared that to what we were deploying in the optical field. The difference in capacity was huge—terabits versus megabits. We then looked at ZR pluggable coherent optics, and how they could give us 400G throughput instead of us having to rely on dedicated line cards or transceivers, and the integrated functionality, cost-efficiency, and lower power consumption of an optical transceiver module. The IP team thought that convergence would be a routing nightmare, but following tests in our lab with the Cisco team, they were sold on the benefits of Routed Optical Networking, too. In fact, both teams are now the biggest advocates for it.

After getting the buy-in of senior management and your technical teams, you are now deploying the technology. Tell us about that and how you are going to operationalize this new infrastructure.

We will roll out Routed Optical Networking over three years across our whole infrastructure, starting with a deployment program for next-generation edge sites this year. We are building it hop-by-hop over a legacy fixed infrastructure, and thanks to Routed Optical Networking, the operation of this infrastructure will be much simpler. To put this into perspective, we used to have an IP planner, a transport planner, and an access planner looking at deployments in the field, and several different network operations centers. Just imagine the complexity of managing an outage, for example, with primary and secondary private lines, transponders, and wavelengths, and thousands of kilometers between them and aggregation routers. In the event of a fiber cut, it used to be incredibly difficult and time consuming to pinpoint which line system was affected. With everything converged using Routed Optical Networking, we will be able to troubleshoot in an instant, easily fix any affected optics, and, in the meantime, use alternate paths to divert traffic to minimize impacts on end-user experience.

That goes back to what you said earlier about having the best network in Canada and creating shareholder value, too. Outages can easily lead to customer attrition, so a provider’s reputation and revenue depend on flawless end-user experiences. Routed Optical Networking will make your infrastructure more sustainable, because of its power and space savings, supporting your journey to net zero emissions.

Absolutely! We estimate that it will enable us to reduce the space and power consumption of our network by a staggering 76%. Simplicity, scalability, savings, and sustainability—Routed Optical Networking will have a far-reaching positive impact on our business. That is why I would encourage my peers in other CSPs to explore transforming their infrastructure in this way, too. Make the case for it with your technical teams and your senior leadership. It will pay off.

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