Carriers today are faced with spiraling changes in the WAN market. For varying reasons, it’s a market that takes an individualized approach to each type of customer. From the residential sector to large corporations, the number of access circuits to the Internet make up a huge part of the telecommunication carriers’ business in Spain. Having said this, what progress is being made in the business? How can the carriers meet the demands and needs present in the market?

Cloud services have fast become very popular at all levels. Services, such as SaaS, laaS and PaaS, are taking over from applications traditionally housed in the customer’s local network infrastructure, improving access infrastructures for end customers. FO deployment, which covers more than 70% of Spain’s territory and cuts deep into leading ISPs’ budgets, has led to a boom in service provider offers (particularly in the residential and SOHO segments). Users now benefit from very competitive services and bandwidth availability, far beyond what was feasible only 10 years ago.

These two trends have increased interest in hybrid networks, where the connecting technology is independent from the transaction itself. But, what is the best hardware for this? For the end user (often the network manager) this means suitable HW at the network access point to manage the different access types. A single device that supports said accesses and simplifies the service would significantly reflect in installation, management and maintenance costs.

Independent access would provide high speed turn around and allow a user to deploy, or even move, an access point with less than 24 hours’ notice. A further advantage of access hardware lies in automated provisioning afforded by ‘Zero Touch’, which simplifies and reduces the complexity of carrier operations to unprecedented levels. Now, we are not talking about NFV or vCPE but of the access technology manufacturers, who offer managed LAN technological solutions to WAN connectivity. Services include, among other things, Wi-Fi and the possibility to execute diverse applications over the router’s access platform. Moreover, these models offer telecommunication providers the opportunity to acquire licensed scalable HW functionality and BW.

All this enforces the idea that future of WAN connectivity services is evolving towards Software Defined technology (capable, through its management hardware, of unifying features). Teldat has been working for some time on cutting-edge SD-WAN solutions anticipating the foreseeable future in communications.