Turkcell deploys TIP distributed disaggregated backbone router

The Telecom Infra Project (TIP) has revealed that leading Turkish fixed and mobile services provider Turkcell has successfully deployed a disaggregated distributed backbone router (DDBR) internet gateway service based on its technology throughout its production network, to deliver cost-effective and reliable connectivity for the operator’s customers and offer the capability to upgrade datacentre capacity.

The TIP initiative is focused on accelerating the pace of innovation in the telecom industry worldwide, and aims to accelerate the pace of innovation in the telecom industry by designing, building and deploying technologies that are more flexible and efficient.

The organisation believes today’s operators face a key challenge: demands on their networks continue to rise despite a persistent connectivity gap. It adds that operators need to extend their networks to connect more people, as well as upgrade their networks to support increasing traffic.

TIP has a number of community labs around the world where members can test and validate new technologies with the goal of creating more flexible, efficient services.

DDBR is an operator-driven initiative developed by TIP’s Open Optical and Transport (OOPT) Project Group, which defines the requirements of an open and disaggregated offering for core routing applications such as Provider Backbone and Peering.

With its architecture, claimed to be unique, DDBR allows operators the flexibility to select the white-box hardware and software combinations that best fit their requirements. The ability to “right-size” initial DDBR deployments also allows for operators to optimise their costs with a pay-as-you-grow model, while also providing a path to seamlessly scale the capacity of the service.

Turkcell has a portfolio of digital offerings along with voice, messaging, data and IPTV services on its mobile and fixed networks. Turkcell Group companies operate in four countries: Turkey, Ukraine, Belarus and Northern Cyprus. Turkcell launched LTE services in its home country in 2016, employing LTE-Advanced and three carrier aggregation technologies in 81 cities, and currently offers up to 10 Gbps fibre internet speed with its fibre-to-the-home services.

The DDBR offering, consisting of Drivenets Network Operating System (DNOS) software with UfiSpace and Edgecore Networks hardware, will give Turkcell the capability to scale the service’s capacity up to 192 Tbps in its Gebze datacenter.

“The deployment of the TIP DDBR solution is the first of its kind in the world, and will deliver cost-effective and reliable connectivity for all of our customers with its unique distributed model,” said Turkcell chief technology officer Gediz Sezgin. “We would like to thank TIP, Drivenets, Edgecore Networks and UfiSpace, who contributed to this success.”

UfiSpace CEO Vincent Ho said: “Turkcell is pushing the boundaries of innovation with their digitisation efforts, and it is important that they have a supportive and flexible network infrastructure to enable the development of new 5G services.

“We are both humbled and excited that Turkcell has completed their validation of UfiSpace’s open core routers integrated with DriveNets DNOS, and we are confident that our solution will be able to allow Turkcell to implement a more resilient core backbone network.”