
Bell Canada’s transformation journey with routed optical networks
Service providers around the world are turning to routed optical networking to make their infrastructure easier and more cost-effective to operate, accelerate the delivery of new services, and add more capacity to keep up with growing customer demand. It is a game-changer and completely redefines the economics of networks by reducing total cost of ownership by up to 45% and dramatically simplifying operations. I sat down with Marc-André Gilbert, Senior Manager of Transport Planning at Bell Canada, to learn more about the company’s network transformation using Routed Optical Networking and how it will enable Bell Canada to deliver the best network in Canada and at the same time significantly reduce costs.
You begin deploying routed optical networking across your entire infrastructure. Tell us what is driving this transformation.
We want to be Canada’s best network – our strategic goal is to provide our customers with the best service and experience. However, with outdated infrastructure, this is easier said than done! We want to modernize our network to make it more efficient so we have the flexibility to grow our business through differentiated services while addressing major industry-wide challenges such as declining margins and ARPU. We have a very healthy business – our dividends have grown 5% over the last 16 years – but this network transformation with Routed Optical Networking will help us further strengthen our financial health and create more value for our shareholders. We have calculated that this will save us 125 million Canadian dollars over the next ten years, while reducing investment costs by around 27%. CapEx savings will more than double if we leverage routed optical networking directly over dark fibers.
How exactly does Routed Optical Networking support your strategic goal of being the best network in Canada? How can you offer the best service at the lowest price and make your business more competitive?
Both our residential and business customers’ bandwidth needs continue to grow, and applications such as IoT are creating new requirements for low latency connectivity. With Routed Optical Networking, we have the flexibility to meet these needs with a more scalable infrastructure that allows us to deliver new fixed and mobile services more cost-effectively. Replacing large, power-hungry transponders with tiny pluggable optics and converging IP and optical layers allows us to rethink the economics of networks and move to 400G and beyond much faster than our competitors.
Ultimately, Routed Optical Networking is the foundation that enables monetization of the service overlay. Still, it wasn’t easy to convince everyone at Bell Canada that a network transformation of this magnitude was the right thing to do. How did you manage that?
Just remember, it’s been almost 150 years since Alexander Graham Bell patented the first practical telephone. This is the legacy that Bell Canada is built on, and Routed Optical Networking is about transforming these very foundations of our business. But it’s not innovation for the sake of innovation. It’s about building on this legacy of innovation and making our company fit for the future.
But change is never easy, and since Routed Optical Networking is about IP and optical convergence, it was crucial that we got buy-in from both our IP and optical teams. Although their responsibilities are different, both want the best for our customers and our company. So together we looked at the capacity of various routers and compared them with what we used in the optical area. The difference in capacity was enormous – terabits versus megabits. We then looked at ZR’s pluggable coherent optics and how it can give us 400G throughput without having to rely on dedicated line cards or transceivers, as well as the built-in functionality, cost effectiveness and lower power consumption of an optical transceiver module . The IP team thought convergence would be a routing nightmare, but after testing in our lab with the Cisco team, they were also convinced of the benefits of routed optical networking. In fact, both teams are now the biggest advocates for it.
After you get buy-in from senior management and your technical teams, now implement the technology. Tell us about it and how you will put this new infrastructure into operation.
We will roll out routed optical networking across our entire infrastructure over a three-year period, starting with a next-generation edge site deployment program this year. We’re building it hop-by-hop on old fixed infrastructure, and thanks to routed optical networking, operating that infrastructure becomes much easier. To put this into perspective, we used to have an IP planner, a transport planner and an access planner dealing with on-site operations, as well as several different network operations centers. Imagine the complexity of dealing with an outage with, for example, primary and secondary private lines, transponders and wavelengths, and thousands of kilometers between them and aggregation routers. In the event of a fiber cut, it used to be extremely difficult and time-consuming to determine which pipe system was affected. When everything is brought together using Routed Optical Networking, we can troubleshoot immediately, easily repair any affected optics, and in the meantime use alternate paths to reroute traffic, minimizing impact on the end user experience.
This goes back to what you said earlier about having the best network in Canada and also creating shareholder value. Outages can easily lead to customer churn, making a provider’s reputation and revenue dependent on flawless end-user experiences. Routed Optical Networking makes your infrastructure more sustainable through power and space savings, helping you on your path to net-zero emissions.
Absolutely! We estimate this will allow us to reduce our network’s space and power consumption by an incredible 76%. Simplicity, scalability, savings and sustainability – Routed Optical Networking will have far-reaching positive impacts on our business. For this reason, I would like to encourage my colleagues in other CSPs to also consider transforming their infrastructure in this way. Advocate for this with your technical teams and leadership. It will pay off.
Share: