The vendor is the sole supplier for the nationwide optical transport project, NEWTON
Swisscom and Nokia announced they have completed the operator’s nationwide Next Evolution Wavelength Transport Optical Network (NEWTON) and begun migrating services onto it.
NEWTON is intended to help Swisscom tackle the high growth in and digital transformation simultaneously, increasing both capacity and its more efficient use. The operator says that in 2021, the surge in remote work and learning applications, video streaming, gaming and cloud computing intensified Swisscom’s goal of bolstering support for business-critical fixed and wireless traffic.
It chose Nokia’s portfolio of optical networking hardware, software and professional services for the entire transformation which included the rollout of 22 backbone sites and 560 metro sites.
This includes the Nokia Photonic Service Engine (PSE)-V powered 1830 family of Wavelength Division Multiplexing/Optical Transport Networking (WDM/OTN) platforms, and the WaveSuite portfolio of networking applications.
Migrate, manage
The deployment was completed ahead of schedule, so now Swisscom and Nokia will jointly manage the migration of services to the new network. Ultimately, it will transport all Swisscom’s fixed and wireless traffic from customers’ equipment to metro access to the backbone. It will run at services from 1Gbps to 400Gbps, aggregating and managing traffic from end-to-end while maximising the use of fibre.
According to a press statement, “The solution will address massive traffic growth by eliminating repetitive tasks, accelerating service delivery, and reducing overall ownership costs. Appreciably lower power consumption – a significant innovation in the Nokia optical portfolio – is also contributing to Swisscom’s corporate sustainability goals by reducing its carbon footprint.”
Service-centric digitalisation
Christoph Aeschlimann, CEO at Swisscom, said, “The transformation of Swisscom’s optical network is essential for our future digitalization. Through the partnership with Nokia, we have a network that can quickly adapt to changes and provide superior service to our customers while contributing to our sustainability goals. We are pleased to move to this next stage of service migration, working together with Nokia as our trusted partner.”
Federico Guillén, President of Network Infrastructure, Nokia, added, “This is a showcase service-centric network, fully leveraging automation to streamline service delivery and minimize costs, even as it effortlessly scales to support surging customer traffic demands.”
You can watch Markus Reber, Head of Network, Swisscom, talking about the network modernisation on this video.