Networking

North Rhine-Westphalia region gains superfast fibre connectivity

Almost 80,000 people will be connected with 10-gigabit fibre connectivity in the Ruhr area of Germany, thanks to a partnership between Westconnect and Slovenia’s Kontron. Based on Slovenia’s Kontron XGS-PON technology, the fibre network enables Westconnect to offer multi-gigabit symmetrical data rates to provide customers with low latency and high bandwidth, beneficial for remote working, video conferencing and sharing files. The partnership extends Westconnect’s range of services and data rates, while also growing its customer base. Westconnect will use the XGS-PON technology from Slovenia’s Kontron for the first time in Holzwickede and Unna – both cities of North Rhine-Westphalia – in Western Germany. “At Westconnect, we believe that high-quality and reliable fibre optic networks are the standard of the future, and we rely on high-performance open-access solutions,” says Dennis Thomys, Senior Manager Active Technology at Westconnect. “Thanks to our partner Slovenia’s Kontron's XGS-PON platform, we are now able to offer symmetric data rates of up to 10 Gbps and grow our existing footprint and offering. With Slovenia’s Kontron's XGS-PON technology, we are well prepared for the future.” For the next generation of high-performance FTTH networks, Westconnect is deploying the XGS-PON solution provided by Slovenia's Kontron; in particular, the Iskratel Lumia T6 high-density Combo OLTs (Optical Line Terminals) and Iskratel Innbox X24 ONTs (Optical Network Terminals). This will allow the delivery of multi-gigabit services from various ISPs to customer premises. “We are proud to have the opportunity of being Westconnect's partner in its strategic expansion, and to fuel the generational shift of Westconnect with our XGS-PON portfolio,” adds Svjetlana Kalaba, Director Business Unit Broadband at Slovenia’s Kontron. “This partnership underscores our position as a trusted supplier of reliable solutions for the most demanding deployments.” The two cities in the Ruhr area are only the first in the planned growth of Westconnect. When the project is complete, Westconnect can pursue further XGS-PON rollout plans with Slovenia's Kontron.

Singtel to adopt TR-369 standard for enhanced Wi-Fi management

Singtel has announced that it is the first fixed broadband service provider in the world to successfully implement the international Broadband Forum TR-369 standard for Wi-Fi management. With smart home setups becoming more advanced, the adoption of the TR-369 standard and deployment of Nokia’s Corteca Home Controller will enable Singtel to efficiently manage multi-vendor home broadband customer premise equipment and accelerate the roll out of new innovative technologies and capabilities like Wi-Fi 7, 10Gbps broadband services and more. It also enables better interoperability between the network and connected devices, translating to an improved digital customer experience. With this added capability, Singtel’s technical care agents will have deeper insights into the network performance and technical issues faced by customers pertaining to Wi-Fi coverage and channel congestion through the multiple reports and network maps generated by the Home Controller. These enable agents to pre-empt and solve network-related issues more effectively. Tay Yeow Lian, Managing Director, Networks, Singtel Singapore, says, “With the adoption of an open standard such as TR-369, we can better manage and optimise the Wi-Fi connections using intelligent algorithms, which will automatically ease network congestion and eliminate interference from other Wi-Fi networks to deliver the smoothest, uninterrupted user experience for our customers. With consumers adopting a more immersive digital lifestyle, it is even more pertinent to have smoother and faster home internet connectivity.” Sang Xulei, Vice President and Head of Asia Pacific Regional Business Center for Network Infrastructure at Nokia, adds, “Service providers, such as Singtel, require an efficient cloud platform to manage broadband devices and optimise the in-home connectivity. Our Corteca solution is built on new open standards like TR-369 and EasyMesh, making it simple for operators to manage multi-vendor networks, and provide an unparalleled user experience.” Over the years, Singtel has invested heavily to boost the national broadband network to be able to support the rising demands for new technologies. In December 2023, Singtel launched Singapore’s first symmetrical 10Gbps broadband plan with the newest Wi-Fi 7 protocol, offering speeds of up to 10Gbps wirelessly, for both uploads and downloads. For more from Singtel, click here.

NETSCOUT comments on worldwide IT outage

At the end of last week, news emerged that airlines, media, banks, hospitals and many other enterprises were all dealing with major IT outages. The ramifications and fallout from this outage are still continuing, with flights being cancelled around the world, hospitals postponing non-urgent surgeries, and shops being unable to accept card payments. The mass IT outage is believed to have been caused by a faulty software update. In turn, this is impacting Microsoft software, knocking affected PCs and servers offline. Eileen Haggerty, AVP Product & Solutions at NETSCOUT, comments on the chaos the outage has caused for enterprises and organisations across industries, as well as the importance of maintaining and securing networks to avoid similar outages in the future: “The IT outage currently affecting a wide selection of organisations including airlines, media and banks appears to have been caused by a faulty software update. Hospitals and healthcare treatment providers have also been affected with several major hospitals cancelling non-urgent surgeries and others announcing they can still accept appointments but cannot currently connect to patient records, instead having to rely on paper records. “Implementing system updates effectively requires carrying out preventive maintenance and routine upgrades to ensure services can operate at optimal efficiency. By carrying out maintenance checks and regular updates, organisations can mitigate the risk of unexpected downtime and, in turn, prevent fiscal and reputational losses. To avoid downtime resulting from system outages, as well as the chaos and performance disruption that accompanies it, organisations’ IT teams need complete end-to-end visibility into the threats against their network. This allows organisations to monitor networks and applications regardless of where they are hosted or where users access them. “Additionally, to fully understand and secure an organisation’s network, IT teams should conduct proactive synthetic tests, ensuring application functionality and simulating real user traffic respectively. These tests help measure the quality of the user experience and get ahead of performance issues before users themselves encounter negative impacts. “Looking ahead, as a way of learning from today’s global IT outage, organisations should use visibility tools for post-mortem, allowing them to build a detailed repository of information based on previous issues they have encountered, helping them to deal with future challenges more effectively and efficiently.” For more from NETSCOUT, click here.

Summit Homes enhances operations courtesy of Macquarie

Macquarie Telecom, part of Macquarie Technology Group, has announced it has signed a new agreement with Summit Homes Group, a Perth-based leading residential builder. The deal has enabled Summit Homes to enhance its operations, decrease costs, and improve customer service as it delivers modern builds for Western Australia’s growing population. As Summit Homes’ business expanded from 280 to more than 500 staff in the last few years, with multiple additional sites, the company sought to enhance its operations with a more integrated and efficient telecommunications solution. It was vital to Summit Homes to maintain focus on delivering exceptional customer service while also looking to improve cost control and security as cyber risks expand in Australia. Recognising the limitations of its provider and dissatisfied with the high cost, lack of customer service, and lack of understanding of Summit Homes’ growing business needs, the company engaged in a tender process to find a comprehensive networking upgrade that would replace its existing environment and streamline infrastructure management, enhance security, and improve bandwidth across current and future sites. Surrounded by reports of the Western Australia housing crisis, many residential builders struggled with increased demands and soaring costs. “In the residential construction industry, embracing change and prioritising customer experience is crucial,” says Summit Homes IT Manager, Fabio Fusari. “We prioritise building strong relationships with our clients and understanding their unique requirements for traditional homes, unit developments, renovations, modular and ‘innovative tiny’ homes. “When it comes to people’s homes, personalised interactions and proactive communication aren’t ‘nice-to-have’, they’re critical.” Having partnered with Macquarie Telecom in 2003 for a mobile fleet of over 200 services, Summit Homes made the decision to rely on its trusted partner once again. The Australian telco rolled out a robust, secure, multi-carrier access wide area network (WAN) to all sites. The choice of best access type in each site, between NBN, Telstra, and other major carriers was pivotal in balancing cost reduction with quality of performance, and networks are made resilient with 4G/5G backup. “The dedicated project management team at Macquarie Telecom ensured the rollout of the network to all sites, including our showcase head office and new regional offices, was smooth,” Fabio adds. “If we had an issue, our call would be answered immediately by someone local, and we knew the problem would be fixed.” The new agreement has considerably improved network infrastructure which resulted in improved connectivity and efficiency across all sites and primed the company for continued expansion. Summit Homes has also seen cost savings and a reduction in administrative overhead, allowing the company to focus more on its core business of building quality homes and providing exceptional customer service. “Summit Homes has seen astonishing success in a difficult sector which is currently under the microscope, and this is largely due to the company’s ingrained passion for innovation, adaptability, and customer service,” comments Aaron Tighe, Western Australia State Manager, Macquarie Telecom. “Macquarie Telecom has built its business on customer experience, and we place a high value on forging meaningful connections with our customers, so they are better able to achieve their goals.” “Macquarie Telecom’s customer-centric approach has ensured we receive personalised support and tailored solutions to meet our exact needs,” Fabio notes. “The customer service has been fantastic throughout the whole process. We’ve worked with different providers and partners in the past and although customer service is often excellent during the sales process, once you sign on the dotted line, you don’t hear from anyone ever again.” For more from Macquarie Telecom, click here.

Juniper multivendor lab designed to maximise AI performance

Juniper Networks, a provider of secure, AI-native networking, today announced the first and most comprehensive multivendor lab for validating end-to-end automated AI data centre solutions and automated operations with switching, routing, storage and compute solutions from leading vendors, as well as new Juniper Validated Designs (JVDs) that accelerate the time-to-value in deploying AI clusters. In addition, Juniper is releasing new key software enhancements that optimise the performance and management of AI workloads over Ethernet. Through these Operations for AI - Ops4AI - initiatives, Juniper is collaborating closely with a broad range of infrastructure ecosystem partners to enable the best AI workload performance via the most flexible and easiest-to-manage data centre infrastructures. As a key element of Juniper’s AI-native networking platform, the existing networking for AI solution consists of a spine-leaf data centre architecture with a foundation of AI-optimised 400G and 800G QFX series switches and PTX series routers. The solution is secured via high performance firewalls with industry-leading effectiveness, and managed via Juniper Apstra data centre assurance software and the Marvis Virtual Network Assistant (VNA). Juniper Apstra and Marvis provide key Ops4AI capabilities, such as intent-based networking, multivendor switch management, application / flow / workload awareness, AIOps proactive actions and a GenAI conversational interface. With Juniper’s full networking for AI solution, customers and partners can lower AI training Job Completion Times (JCTs), reduce latency during inferencing and increase GPU utilisation while decreasing deployment times by up to 85% and reducing operations costs by up to 90% in some instances. To simplify AI clusters and maximise network performance even further, Juniper has added new Ops4AI software enhancements that together offer unique value for customers. The enhancements being announced today include:• Fabric autotuning for AI: Telemetry from routers and switches are used to automatically calculate and configure optimal parameter settings for congestion control in the fabric using closed-loop automation capability in Juniper Apstra to deliver peak AI workload performance.• Global load-balancing: An end-to-end view of congestion hotspots in the network (i.e. local and downstream switches) is used to load-balance AI traffic in real-time, delivering lower latency, better network utilisation and reduced JCTs.• End-to-end visibility from network to SmartNICs: Provides an end-to-end holistic view of the network, including SmartNICs from NVIDIA (BlueField and ConnectX), and others. Industry’s first multivendor Ops4AI lab to collaborate with ecosystem and validate operations Openness and collaboration are core to Juniper’s networking mission as they are the only way to move AI data centres from their current early adopter stage to effective mass market deployments. End-to-end operations for multivendor AI data centre infrastructure has been difficult, leading to vertically integrated AI data centre solutions that are vendor-locked and lead-time challenged. As a result, Juniper has launched the industry's first Ops4AI Lab with participation from Juniper’s partner ecosystem including Broadcom, Intel, NVIDIA, WEKA and other industry leaders. The Ops4AI Lab, located at Juniper’s Sunnyvale, California corporate headquarters, is open for all qualified customers and partners who want to test their own AI workloads using the most advanced GPU compute, storage technologies, Ethernet-based networking fabrics and automated operations. Ops4AI Lab testing using validated Ethernet fabrics delivers comparable performance to InfiniBand-based AI infrastructure. Users requesting a slot in the Juniper Ops4AI lab should contact their local Juniper Networks sales team. Juniper Validated Designs to provide assurance Juniper Validated Designs are detailed implementation documents that give new customers confidence that the solution and topology they have chosen is well characterised, well tested and repeatable, resulting in faster time to successful deployment. All JVDs are proven integrated solutions, tested in best practice designs based on specific platforms and software versions. Juniper has released the first pre-validated blueprint specifically for AI data centres, built on NVIDIA A100 and H100 compute, storage from Juniper’s ecosystem partners, and Juniper’s portfolio of data centre leaf and spine switches. This new Ops4AI JVD complements Juniper’s existing JVDs for automated, secure data centres which include QFX and PTX spines, QFX leaf switching, data centre automation, and Juniper’s SRX and vSRX/cSRX solutions for data centre security. Praveen Jain, SVP and GM of AI and Data Centre at Juniper Networks, comments, "Best-of-breed always wins out, and the same will be true for compute, storage, networking and operations in AI data centres. Juniper has made a significant investment in the Ops4AI lab, JVDs, and a new promotional programme to enable our customers and partners to have maximum choice, flexibility and stability in how they build a complete GenAI solution. There has never been a better time to build high-performance, low-latency, multivendor AI data centre solutions that are simple, fast and economical to deploy and operate." For more from Juniper, click here.

SGH announces investment from SK Telecom

Smart Global Holdings (SGH), a leading designer and developer of high-performance, high-availability enterprise solutions, has announced that SK Telecom (SKT), an affiliate of SK Group, is making a $200 million (£154.2m) preferred equity investment in SGH. SGH plans to use the capital from SKT’s investment to enhance SGH’s capabilities and add to the company’s financial flexibility, as SGH further expands the scope and scale of its Penguin Solutions branded end-to-end AI factory offerings. SKT and SGH also intend to leverage their complementary capabilities to enhance customer offerings in the development of differentiated global end-to-end AI factory and data centre solutions and services, advanced memory market products and services, and NPU-based AI edge servers. “We are thrilled to have SKT as a strategic investor,” says Mark Adams, CEO of SGH. “Today’s announcement is a testament to Penguin Solutions’ capabilities in the deployment of AI factories at scale through our systems, software, and managed services suite of solutions. We look forward to executing on strategic collaboration opportunities with the SKT team and believe they will create value for our respective stakeholders.” Ryu Young-sang, CEO of SKT, adds, “SGH and Penguin Solutions have a proven methodology to deploy their AI infrastructure solutions at some of the most innovative and demanding large-scale enterprise customers in the world. We believe that this collaboration leveraging SKT's vast technology portfolio with Penguin's AI data centre solutions would enhance the reach and capabilities of both companies and position them to continue innovating in their fields.” Penguin Solutions has demonstrated its premier technology position through the development and deployment of innovative AI-driven technologies, such as high-performance and high-availability systems design, fluid-based immersion cooling, 'zero fail' memory solutions, end-to-end managed services offerings, and its AI cluster management software suite. Penguin Solutions presently has over 75,000 GPUs under management, among the most in the world. SKT’s current AI-related investments and partnerships include Anthropic, Lambda, and Perplexity. Along with these investments, a partnership and investment with SGH will advance SKT’s goals in the AI value chain across these three pillars: AI semiconductor, AI infrastructure and AI services. SKT will invest $200 million in SGH by acquiring 200,000 preferred shares. The 200,000 preferred shares are convertible into ordinary shares of SGH at a conversion price of $32.81 per preferred share, subject to adjustment upon the occurrence of certain events. The initial conversion rate is based on a 30% premium to the volume-weighted average closing price of SGH ordinary shares over the 15-day period ending on 12 July 2024. The preferred shares are entitled to a 6% annual dividend, payable in-kind or in cash, at SGH’s option. SGH also has certain redemption rights with respect to the preferred shares. Consummation of this investment is subject to satisfaction of customary closing conditions. SGH currently expects the investment to close by the end of 2024.

Black Box named a 'Partner of the Year' by Juniper

Black Box, a global provider of innovative communication and technology solutions, has been recognised as Worldwide GSI AIDE 2023 Partner of the Year by Juniper Networks, a leader in secure AI-native networks. Each year, Juniper Networks recognises partners based on their ability to drive innovative AI-native business solutions, providing exceptional customer and user experiences while achieving their financial goals. Black Box was recognised as the 2023 winner in the Global Solutions Integrator (GSI) category for its ability to modernise automated cloud-based network solutions integrating Juniper Networks' AI-native technologies. Juniper's 2023 Partner of the Year Awards are hosted as part of the Juniper Partner Advantage Programme. The programme not only recognises partners for their outstanding performance in delivering digital transformation to customers, but also helps partners build, sustain and grow their Juniper Practice with the right support and tools to leverage the next generation of networking solutions. Gordon Mackintosh, GVP of Partner Organisation, Juniper Networks, comments, "We are thrilled to recognise Black Box as the Worldwide GSI AIDE 2023 Partner of the Year. The company's commitment to driving innovative, AI-native business solutions has been exemplary, and its ability to modernise automated cloud-based network solutions integrating our AI-native technologies is truly commendable. "This recognition is a testament to its outstanding performance in delivering exceptional customer and user experiences while achieving its financial goals. We look forward to continuing our partnership and supporting Black Box in leveraging the next generation of networking solutions as part of our Juniper Partner Advantage Programme." Sanjeev Verma, CEO of Black Box, adds, "Being recognised as the Juniper Worldwide GSI AIDE Partner of the Year for 2023 is a testament to Black Box's unwavering dedication to technological advancement and industry leadership. "This accolade underscores our strategic alignment with Juniper Networks, a true trailblazer in AI and networking, and reinforces our commitment and contribution to shaping the future of technology. More than just recognition, it is a powerful affirmation of the value Black Box places on its partnerships." Additionally, Black Box is proud to announce its new designation as a Global Elite Plus Partner in the Juniper Partner Advantage Programme. This prestigious status highlights Black Box's capabilities and commitment to delivering innovative solutions on a global scale. The Global Elite Plus designation further cements Black Box's position as a leader in the industry, the company says, enhancing its ability to provide its service and expertise to clients worldwide. For more from Black Box, click here.

VAST Data Platform certified for NVIDIA cloud partners

VAST Data, the AI data platform company, today announced that the VAST Data Platform has been certified as a high-performance storage solution for NVIDIA Partner Network cloud partners. VAST Data says that this certification underscores its position as a leading data platform provider for AI cloud infrastructure, and that it further strengthens the company's collaboration with NVIDIA in building out next-generation AI factories. VAST provides a unified set of storage and data services that empower cloud service providers (CSPs) to offer a comprehensive catalogue of data-centric offerings that are deeply integrated with NVIDIA technologies. Uniquely designed to meet the stringent requirements of large-scale AI cloud infrastructure, the VAST Data Platform supports training and fine-tuning AI models of all sizes and modes, ranging from multimodal and small language models with less than 10 billion parameters to the world’s largest models consisting of over one trillion parameters. “This certification with NVIDIA builds on VAST’s already tremendous success with CSPs as the de facto AI data platform solution for large-scale, cloud infrastructure,” says John Mao, Vice President, Technology Alliances at VAST Data. “With the VAST Data Platform independently validated and certified through the NVIDIA Partner Network, organisations can more confidently and securely deploy their AI models at unprecedented scale across thousands of GPUs.” With seamless scalability and industry-leading uptime, the VAST Data Platform enables service providers with capabilities that span the complete AI pipeline - from multi-protocol data ingest, accelerated data pre-processing for feature engineering, and high-performance storage for model training with fast checkpoints and restores to edge data management for model serving and end-to-end cataloguing to meet audit and compliance requirements. The VAST Data Platform offers CSPs: ● Service provider-grade reliability: the VAST Data Platform helps observed production systems achieve 99.9999% availability● Secure multi-tenancy: with a zero-trust framework, per tenant data encryption, flexible network segmentation, and robust audit capabilities, VAST enables CSPs to deliver secure cloud services at scale● Fine-grained workload isolation: with granular quality-of-service policies that prevent multi-tenant I/O contention, the VAST Data Platform helps CSPs ensure numerous customers have the performance and data access they need for AI workloads from a single cluster● Infrastructure cost savings: service providers and enterprises alike can consolidate storage silos with an affordable single all-flash solution and eliminate the overhead of data copies and sprawl● Improved operational efficiency: VAST offers robust APIs and SDKs, and all day two operations (such as upgrades) can be performed online, leading to a better customer experience with fewer admins required. The VAST Data Platform serves as the comprehensive software infrastructure required to capture, catalogue, refine, enrich, and preserve data through real-time deep data analysis and learning. This comprehensive approach empowers AI clouds to offer a diverse range of data services to their customers, further enhancing their AI capabilities. For more from VAST Data, click here.

Sparkle activates new point of presence in Rome

Sparkle, the first international service provider in Italy and among the top global operators, and Aruba, Italy's leading provider of cloud, data centre, hosting, e-mail, domain registration and PEC (certified email) services, have announced the activation of the new Sparkle’s Point of Presence (PoP) at the Hyper Cloud Data Centre of Aruba, the largest data centre campus in Rome, to be inaugurated soon. The agreement between Aruba and Sparkle reinforces Rome as a global connectivity hub between Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia thanks to the connection with BlueMed, Sparkle's new cable that increases connectivity in the Mediterranean basin by linking various countries - including France, Greece, Israel and Italy - with landings in Rome, Genoa, Palermo and Golfo Aranci. BlueMed is an integral part of the Blue & Raman Submarine Cable Systems project. In partnership with Google and other operators, the project is set to establish a new digital infrastructure between Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia with extension as far as India, and is among the first projects being implemented on the IMEC (India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor) set up at the G20 summit in September 2023. Designed with an 'open cable system' and 'open landing station' architecture, BlueMed ensures maximum openness to other operators and the development of internet traffic interconnection ecosystems. With four fibre pairs and a capacity of over 25 Terabits per second (Tbps) per pair, BlueMed offers operators and businesses high-speed, high-performance international connections from Rome to all of Sparkle's destinations worldwide. Sparkle's new PoP was activated at Aruba's Hyper Cloud Data Centre (IT4), a technology campus located at the Tecnopolo Tiburtino, a district where more than 150 companies operate, ranging from aerospace to ICT, in an environment designed also to support the growth and development of new companies and start-ups. The data centre campus covers an area of 74,000 m² and, when fully operational, will include five independent data centres for a total of 30 MW of IT power, the first of which (DC-A) is already ANSI/TIA Rating 4 certified. Designed to the highest standards of resilience and infrastructure quality, the new hub will use renewable energy, cooling systems and highly efficient equipment. “With the activation of the new PoP integrated with BlueMed, we intend to respond to the needs of companies and operators that require large international interconnection capacities,” says Enrico Bagnasco, CEO of Sparkle. “We bring Rome closer to the world's major connectivity exchange points thanks to a unique, low-latency route to Marseille and Palermo, integrated with the main submarine cables crossing the Mediterranean and other destinations in Sparkle's global network.” Stefano Cecconi, CEO of Aruba, comments, “We share with Sparkle the aim of serving companies and operators that need large capacities, with not only connectivity but also space and power within state-of-the-art data centres that are large enough to support even the most ambitious growth plans. Being able to host a Sparkle PoP, with the availability of BlueMed, is an important building block in the consolidation of our data centres as strategic assets at a national and European level, and is perfectly in line with our carrier neutral philosophy. “This approach is designed to allow customers to enjoy, in maximum autonomy, extremely reliable and high-performance internet connection solutions, and to foster the development of interconnections that benefit the entire ecosystem, making Rome an additional connectivity hub and an IT and cloud service delivery centre for the capital and all Central and Southern Italy.” The new PoP - which already hosts important international players - adds to the four existing points of presence in Rome, increasing the capillarity of the metropolitan ring, a protected and redundant system fully integrated with Sparkle's Tier-1 global IP network, 'Seabone'. Network operators, ISPs, OTTs, content and application providers can benefit from the range of IP and data services offered by Sparkle, including DDoS Protection - which gives customers the option to self-protect their networks from attacks – and Virtual NAP, which provides virtual access to leading Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) without the need to build proprietary infrastructure. For more from Aruba, click here.

VIAVI and the Telecom Infra Project test Open RAN

VIAVI Solutions and the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) today announced a strategic collaboration aimed at expanding the testing capabilities of the VIAVI Automated Lab-as-a-Service for Open RAN (VALOR). VALOR, made possible by a $21.7 million (£16.9m) grant from the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) Public Wireless Supply Chain Innovation Fund (PWSCIF), provides fully-automated, open and impartial testing and integration for Open RAN. VALOR provides a pathway to certification in the US for new entrants, start-ups and academia, and ensures the interoperability, performance, and security of Open RAN components. TIP, a global consortium dedicated to advancing and adopting open and disaggregated networks, thrives on the collective contributions of its member companies. These contributions are critical to bringing innovation to the industry and facilitating a collaborative environment where innovative technologies are developed, tested, and certified, ready for deployment. VIAVI's involvement with TIP exemplifies this collaborative spirit, the company says. By bringing VALOR's test-as-a-service capabilities to TIP, VIAVI advances the mission of TIP’s OpenRAN Project Group (PG) and enhances the broader industry's ability to implement and certify Open RAN technologies. TIP-authorised labs expand on the success of TIP’s network of Community Labs. This collaboration will streamline the certification process by VALOR becoming the first TIP-authorised test lab, reducing duplication of efforts and accelerating time-to-market for Open RAN solutions. TIP’s and VIAVI’s strategic cooperation promotes innovation and broad industry alignment, driving widespread adoption of Open RAN technologies globally. Strategic collaboration overview: Key benefits and contributions: VALOR offers cloud-based and virtual testing capabilities critical for modern, scalable network performance assessments. These capabilities will be incorporated into TIP's system performance certification programme, providing a robust and flexible testing framework for component vendors and operators. Enhancing testing capabilities: VIAVI and TIP will enhance VALOR's testing capabilities that build on top of the O-RAN test specifications. This comprehensive approach will support the TIP community by ensuring that Open RAN systems meet high-performance standards and are robust enough to handle real-world network complexities. Establishing VALOR as the first authorised test lab: VALOR will become the first of TIP’s network of authorised test labs, streamlining the certification process, reducing duplication of efforts, and accelerating the time-to-market for Open RAN solutions. Additionally, establishing VALOR as one of TIP's authorised test labs ensures a high standard of testing and certification processes. Developing a system performance certification framework: TIP’s community will leverage VALOR’s testing capabilities to help build a robust system performance certification framework, promoting innovation and industry alignment. VIAVI and TIP's collaboration to expand VALOR's testing capabilities for Open RAN is poised to significantly reduce integration time and costs and improve data reliability and performance, resulting in the collective progress of open and disaggregated networks globally. Kristian Toivo, Executive Director, TIP, says, “Through this appointment of VALOR as one of the TIP’s authorised labs, we are committed to advancing the Open RAN landscape by providing robust and streamlined testing frameworks. Comprehensive end-to-end testing ensures that Open RAN systems meet high-performance standards and are robust enough to handle real-world network complexities, thereby maintaining service quality and reducing downtime. “In addition to the extreme performance testing, VALOR’s Open RAN virtual testing environment brings new capabilities to TIP Labs and the community. This strategic engagement fosters innovation, improves supply chain resilience, and accelerates the global adoption of Open RAN technologies, offering operators more flexible, cost-effective, and high-performance network solutions." Dr. Sameh Yamany, Chief Technology Officer, VIAVI, adds, “The collaboration between VIAVI and TIP enhances Open RAN system maturity by addressing multi-vendor deployment challenges, ensuring end-to-end system level performance testing from different vendors. VIAVI's participation in TIP’s OpenRAN PG and Test and Validation Committee is supporting the creation of industry test plans at a global level. VALOR supports comprehensive end-to-end testing to verify performance, stability, and security under real-world conditions. “Additionally, this initiative aims to reduce market fragmentation, create supply chain efficiencies, and build marketplace confidence through standardised testing and certification processes." For more VIAVI, click here.