All its home broadband, mobile and business customers will move onto the backbone to improve customer experience, cut cost and make network operations greener
Vodafone is in final stages of its multi-year Redstream Evolution project to upgrade its backbone network. It will carry all the traffic from mobile, home broadband and business customers onto a single network which until now had been achieved on three separate networks.
Rearchitecting Vodafone’s UK transport network was vital to ensure optimal customer experience and accommodate increased data consumption in the future, the operator said.
Vodafone has started connecting home broadband, mobile and business customers to the converged network and should benefit from the economies of scale and reduce the environmental impact of network operations.
The scalable, high-capacity core network is critical for Vodafone as:
- its home broadband customer base has increased from 687,000 in February 2020 to 1.2 million connections in February 2023;
- customers’ mobile data consumption in the UK has increased about 300% between 2019 and 2023; and
- business customers are adopting digital and cloud-based enterprise applications, increasing the amount of data crossing the Vodafone network.
Andrea Dona, Chief Network Officer, Vodafone UK (pictured), said, “The massive growth in data-hungry consumer apps and business services, alongside ever-increasing internet usage, simply cannot be supported by traditional approaches to network management and capacity expansion. Data is subject to the same rules as road congestion – if the transport network gets congested, we can’t get where we want to be as quickly as we want to.
“Operationally, the edge-based, SDN [software-defined network] design will allow us to partially decouple the data explosion and usage growth we’re seeing from the associated capital and running costs, through better, automated network and capacity management,” he added.
SDN and edge
The “edge-based*, SDN design” will enable Vodafone to work with business customers and technology partners “in new and interesting ways” as it is “the foundation for embedding more intelligence in the network. This is important for several reasons, including improving streaming services,” according to the press statement.
It continues, “With more adaptable and flexible infrastructure, content partners can host content in more strategic locations closer to the consumer, reducing the risk of buffering and lag when streaming content.
“It will also enable a differentiated approach to net neutrality. A greater emphasis and understanding from policy makers to ensure networks remain sustainable economically will hopefully allow us to continue to satisfy ever increasing consumer demand for data in the years ahead.”
- We have asked Vodafone for more information about exactly what it means by edge-based and will add the information when we receive it