Fiber@Home Ltd, the country's largest nationwide transmission service provider, has partnered with Cisco to accelerate conversion of its network to 5G.
The partnership will enable the company to seamlessly deploy an automated 5G-ready network across Bangladesh and support increased bandwidth demand from businesses of all sizes, according to a press statement.
Fiber@Home is using Cisco platforms for this expansion to enhance and optimise overall customer experience, becoming the first client in the country to adopt Cisco's Routed Optical Networking technology.
The local company is witnessing disruptive growth and adopting new technology to more efficiently build and cost-effectively manage critical IP networking infrastructure as well as support future innovations, including evolution of enterprise services, 5G and IoT.
Additionally, Fiber@Home aims to optimise its CapEx and OpEx by implementing new architectures on platforms ready for mass-scale networking and through automation.
The company is focusing on deploying Cisco Network Services Orchestrator (NSO) software platform on its current network as a foundation for infrastructure programmability, automating operations and customer-facing services, the statement added.
"This new 400G wavelength (5G) network will offer a fourfold increase in maximum data transfer speed compared to 100G wavelength (4G) network, enabling our company to provide stable critical connectivity to customers," said Fiber@Home Chairman Moynul Haque Siddiqui.
"Cisco Routed Optical Networking solution streamlines and strengthens our network capacity, providing a superior customer experience and optimising Fiber@Home's CapEx and OpEx utilisation," he added.
The upgradation to 400G wavelength will support the exponential demand for data in Bangladesh by both businesses and consumers, by converging the company's IP and optical networks onto Cisco's unified platform.
Besides, Fiber@Home will have an ability to enhance capacity while reducing footprint and power for a lower carbon impact. The network modelling of the solution shows up to 40-45 per cent power reduction and real estate optimisation.
With IOS XR7 modularity, programmability minimises human intervention during set-up and operation, thus reducing onsite operations.
"Service providers like Fibre@Home recognise the value of a network that can be scaled in response to the dynamic needs of consumers and businesses" said Anand Bhaskar, Managing Director, Service Provider Business, Cisco India & SAARC.
"By converging its IP and optical networks, in addition to greater wavelength utilisation, the company will be able to optimise power consumption, resulting in a much lower carbon impact, and streamline hardware, leading to a reduction of 50 per cent in operational costs."
"This partnership is a step towards bringing fast, reliable, and sustainable internet services to the people of Bangladesh," he added.
