The key to a sustainable business is the ability to understand its most simplest demands.
-------- Gujarati Proverb
1. The scaling dilemma of wholesale
Wholesale bandwidth provider, although does not have the kind of growth and visibility of traffic like the mobile backhaul provider, has the ambition and vision to grow even beyond them. However, their business is always on a catch 22 scenario where they are always in a dilemma of growing their infrastructure or expanding their coverage in the area. Capacity and coverage have always dominated the scale of the telecom business and this is not new even today. While the methods have changed with respect to deploying the telecom services the fundamentals of growth have not changed at all. There is still this old dilemma of whether to increase the capacity of a small sector or increase the coverage of the area so that more of the geography could be covered.
If we are considering a common DWDM oriented network in the telecom sector and especially for the wholesale bandwidth provider then the most important factor that dominates the allocation of CAPEX is the traffic matrix. In case we have 100 dollars for spending then 70 dollars are actually attributed to the traffic cards or the traffic section of the network. Let us understand that these traffic cards or the traffic elements can be IP, OTN-Transport or even the ODU-XC.
Therefore, let us understand that for the entire capex that includes the infrastructure of layer-0 as well as the traffic there can be a limited coverage of the are, especially when the amount of traffic is not known. The planning department of a wholesale entity relies on the business forecasting group to tell them about the planned capacity and then the back-calculation of CAPEX is done. In this back-calculation many things are actually missed out and one of the most primary things out of them is the ability of the DWDM infrastructure (30% of the CAPEX) to act as a primary infrastructure provider that can accommodate the demands of the bandwidth should the end customer also have a tunable service device that can ride on the wavelength of the wholesale bandwidth provider.
This particular thought process can save almost 50% to 60% of the CAPEX that the wholesale BW provider is trying to put in and can improve bottom-lines considerably.
2. What is Alien Channel?
We discussed above as to how the CAPEX can be optimized to the level of 50% to 60% based on the availability of the tunable interface in the end customer devices. Alien channel actually enables the same thing in a wholesale BW infrastructure.
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| Basic concept of Alien channel |
1. The OLS (Optical Line System)
2. The Service (Traffic)
Generally when the wholesale entity plans the network it plans for both the components of traffic and for the OLS. The OLS is the infrastructure portion of the network, while the service part is the part of the network that is consisting of the traffic generation and distribution. The OLS part of the network is the most certain part of the network where the provider knows which are the sites that could be potential traffic sites and which ones are only there for amplification .
The entire coverage of the network is dependent on the planning of the OLS. Therefore, this can be called as the infrastructure layer or the skeleton of the network on which the traffic rides.
Let us understand that a provider on day-1 only has the OLS and does not have the visibility of the traffic that it wants to carry. Now another operator comes and asks if it can lease capacity from the provider. The conventional answer is that the wholesale will provision OTN traffic across the two points and then provide the pricing for the bandwidth. However, if the end operator already has the relevant transceivers that can run traffic on a C-Band or L-Band network then it becomes technically easy to accommodate these traffic demands to the existing OLS that has been already created.
So the bandwidth provider now needs to provision a OCH path in the OLS and then this can carry the signal of the operator as an "alien" channel, meaning a wavelength of a different vendor in the optical line system. In case the OLS is able to carry the signal of the other operator then it is called an alien channel enabled OLS.
3. How is Alien Channel a benefit for wholesale?
While one may come up with the fact that there are so many moving parts in this solution and so much of dependency involved, one has to understand the commercial benefit of this solution that is a driving factor for the wholesale business. When we talk about the commercial benefits we are talking about two basic things over here. Money and time. So let us cross analyze what are the benefits in each aspects.
3.1 The money benefit:
The costliest part of the establishing a multi terabit network is not the OLS it is actually the provisioning of the traffic card. The transponders, ODU-XC, IP routers etc are the larger part of the CAPEX pie. In the case of alien channel this huge portion is taken out from the wholesale bandwidth provider side. This means more room for savings and bring in the customer. The money benefit also translates to improving the margins to a great extent.
3.2 The expansion benefit:
As discussed before, the wholesale provider should focus in the coverage of the territory. This is also CAPEX dependent in many terms. If the focus is shifted to Alien Channels then the provider, without locking its CAPEX to the service cards and other traffic generating devices can focus on expanding the Flex-Grid network across the territory and thus can cover more part of it.
3.3 The delivery benefit:
Today the wholesale industry is totally dependent on the time to delivery. The alien channel helps the provider to immediately activate the bandwidth required without any kind of additional hassles of integration with the grey interfaces and power requirements. The approach is direct and provides immediate activation of the bandwidth with respect to the ordered date. This provides a good level of comfort to the end customer for their services to be started asap.
3.4 A Win-Win situation:
Frankly speaking, every telecom operator, big or small, would be keen to have a dark fiber to their own disposal so that they can have a better control over the traffic devices. Although this is ideal, it is not possible to achieve in the real world. Alien channel provides this comfort, especially to the end customers/operators who are desiring of controlling their own traffic but do not want to invest on optical infrastructure. The wholesale provider over here provides a slice of the fiber, which the end customer gladly accepts running their own network on it. This gives them better options of leveraging their bandwidth and capacity within the prescribed channel OSNR that they have got. On the other hand it provides the wholesale bandwidth provider a sort of relaxation of not requiring to maintain inventories for different kind of cards and having a liability of the same.
4. Alien Spectrum
In continuation with the Alien-Channel where we are talking about just one wavelength that can be a carrier for any kind of throughput rates we are now progressing towards a concept that is called as Alien Spectrum also sometimes referred to as Shared Spectrum.
Alien Spectrum is a new concept where it is possible to provide the end user a bigger slice of the spectrum on which based on the requirement the end user can provision multiple lines or throughput. In order to understand this concept let us take an example below.
A Hyper-scaler named A wants to have its terrestrial bandwidth across a region. A CoC named X has already got its flex-grid network deployed in that region. The Hyper-scaler desires to have bandwidth from point -1 to point-2 in the region. However, the contention here is that the hyper-scaler has two data centers with different kind of traffic profiles from different end routers. Some routers are emanating the 400Gbps line with a need of 75GHz width while some are giving out line bandwidth with 100Gbps on 50GHz, some need 800Gbps with 150GHz spacing and so on.
Here the common approach can be the Hyper-scaler coming to the CoC and asking for different channels each of say 50Ghz, 100GHz and so on. However, the CoC here proposes a smart plan for the hyper-scaler. The CoC tells the hyperscaler to take a common shared spectrum of 500Ghz on its network and provide the flexibility to the hyper-scaler to split it in the way it wants.
Hyper-scalers asking for Alien Spectrum
The hyper-scaler sees a very good value over here as this provides the essential control of spectrum and channel width allocation that it wants in order to have complete flexibility with the bandwidth. On the other hand the CoC is also sanguine that most of the demands of the hyper-scaler can be met in a flexible manner while its main focus would be to control the shared spectrum from one point to another point.
This particular arrangement is called Shared Spectrum or Alien Spectrum. Here as we can see the service is not limited to a wavelength or a channel but it is a collection of channel that can be provided to the end user where the end user has the control over the channel and the width allocation.
5. And Finally:
Alien channel and spectrum are very good tools for a CoC to sustain a healthy business while giving proper freedom to the end customer. This also removes a lot of liability from the head of the CoC and helps it to focus on the aspect of connectivity delivery that is a core objective of a CoC or a wholesale bandwidth provider.
This concept provides the freedom to the wholesale provider to scale up and spread across the region so that the coverage of the region can be achieved in lower time-frame.
If you are a part of a wholesale bandwidth provider and you are also a part of the planning department, do consider this option so that the spread of the network can be accelerated.
Do give me your inputs in the comments.
Cheers,
Kalyan
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