South Africa’s DFA automates and virtualises service offerings

Streamlines and accelerates service delivery across existing multi-vendor network.

Friday, 2nd December 2016 Posted 8 years ago in by Phil Alsop

Dark Fibre Africa (DFA), South Africa's leading provider of open-access fibre infrastructure, is deploying Ciena’s Blue Planet orchestration software to automate the delivery of Ethernet services across its existing multi-vendor network and provide more service flexibility and agility for their customers. DFA will benefit from increased programmability of its network to more efficiently roll out existing services, and be enabled to more rapidly turn up new offerings. DFA will also leverage Blue Planet to launch its new Magellan suite of Ethernet managed services.

DFA finances, builds, installs, manages and maintains a world-class dark fibre network to transmit metro and long-haul telecommunications traffic in South Africa. DFA has close to 8,000 km of fibre infrastructure nationwide, providing its customers with Ethernet services including high-bandwidth, open-access dark fibre links, hosting, last-mile access, backhaul and long-haul connectivity.

With Ciena’s Blue Planet Multi-Domain Service Orchestration (MDSO) capability, DFA can automate network and service provisioning, significantly improving service velocity. For example, DFA will now be able to provision more than 500 new services a month, significantly increasing the number of services it can offer per week; and allow its customers to leverage new, virtualised add-on services. Blue Planet will also help break down management silos across different vendor and technology domains, and reduce operating costs for DFA.

The introduction of Blue Planet will play a key role in DFA’s commitment to improving the country's ICT infrastructure, helping to improve network readiness, increase competition and make high-speed connectivity more affordable. By rolling out a portfolio of new value-added virtualised services with Ciena’s Blue Planet Network Functions Virtualisation Orchestration (NFVO) capabilities, DFA’s customers stand to benefit from unparalleled scalability and coverage with access to new on-demand offerings like virtual routing and firewall services, easily accessed via a self-service portal.