Telia Carrier expands SD-WAN solution portfolio
Stockholm-based network provider claims global service, based on Viptela and Cisco technology, is world’s best-connected SD-WAN offer
Telia Carrier has announced with no little fanfare a new SD-WAN service that the company describes as an end-to-end networking solution providing “superior” visibility, agility and control beyond the traditional WAN perimeter.
The company says that in 2017 it was the first European service provider to launch SD-WAN, and that it was now strengthening its offering to meet the growing demands of global enterprises in Europe, North America and parts of Asia.
Telia Carrier notes that SD-WAN continues to attract global enterprises eager to modernise their infrastructures and accelerate their network transformation. It cited Gartner Group research showing that three-fifths of enterprises are planning to implement SD-WAN services by 2023, and that more than four-fifths are planning to use a hybrid WAN combining MPLS/Ethernet and the internet.
The new SD-WAN service is said to offer a “seamless” approach for enterprises that need to balance their dependency on MPLS with internet connectivity.
Based on Cisco SD-WAN powered by Viptela, the new offer is claimed to be the only SD-WAN service in the world where enterprises can attach their WAN overlay to the Telia Carrier backbone internet network, said to be the world’s best-connected. It utilises Telia Carrier’s cloud-scale internet backbone as the underlay, which complements the resilient overlay it can build on Cisco’s SD-WAN platform.
Customers can define their own levels of control, and enterprise customers have a choice of either a fully managed or a co-managed model.
“We see tremendous opportunities to help global enterprises with their digital transformation journeys through the ‘cloudification of networking’ – using a centralised, unified, cloud-based controller that covers the extended WAN environment, with the support of our backbone as the primary underlay,” said Staffan Göjeryd, CEO at Telia Carrier.
Read more about SD-WAN
- SD-WAN offers several benefits, but companies also need to understand SD-WAN costs. Organisations need to consider some critical areas – and not all of them are obvious.
- As networking pros evaluate SD-branch vs SD-WAN, they’ll notice a key distinction between the two technologies, namely how network functions are managed and orchestrated.
- Cato Networks survey highlights the importance of considering not only SD-WAN as an MPLS replacement but also its applicability to the broader needs of the digital business, such as cloud migration, network agility and security.
“SD-WAN has the capability to deliver transformative results for organisations looking to harness the power of a cloud-based consumption model,” said Erin Dunne, director of research at Vertical Systems Group, which provides insight and statistics on networking and cloud connectivity services.
“By combining the latest developments in SD-WAN with proven carrier solutions, Telia Carrier is addressing current migration challenges in this market.”
The new offer is the second in a matter weeks that Telia Carrier has launched with Cisco. In February 2020, it introduced what it said was again a first-of-its-kind, full-scale, 400GE-ready network making use of Cisco NCS5500 series routers, to give customers global reach to more service provider networks than any other carrier in the world.
