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The rapid growth of the SD-WAN managed services market is driving a sharp increase in demand by service providers for residential Internet access in general, and Fiber to the Home (FTTH)-based access services specifically. Flexibility is extremely important for operators in the SD-WAN market, to allow them to quickly adapt to a changing market environment. Automation, open APIs, and trouble-free operations form the three pillars of the future success of the SD-WAN services market.
These three pillars apply to the Fiber to the Home (FTTH) industry, in which a managed services provider has to handle various interactions with multiple and often hundreds of partners. As an example, let’s look at the Bitstream Wholesale use case:
The FTTH/Bitstream Wholesale Use Case
The rapid expansion of the FTTH network in Poland, and the urgent need for operators to automate commercial and business connections, provided the motivation for Enxoo to demonstrate, in MEF 3.0 PoC (134), how it enables a Polish FTTH customer, Nexera, to streamline its interactions with service provider partners. Nexera was also facing these challenges as one of Enxoo’s key customers and the first FTTH wholesale telecommunications operator in Poland operating exclusively on a large scale.
The interaction between wholesale Fiber To The Home (FTTH) operators and their service provider partners can generate thousands, or even millions, of events per day. Optical fiber infrastructure is the key technology of today’s connectivity, starting with submarine cables, extending to PON, and all the way to our homes. Optical fiber is therefore an essential component for enabling SD-WAN services for remote workers and broadening service availability.
Evolving business models in the telecom industry favor the growth of infrastructure providers that focus primarily on fiber-optic construction and maintenance, and reselling their services to other providers. However, today, from a commercial perspective, the reselling of services requires standardization of specifications to ensure frictionless business-to-business interactions between service providers.
API standards create an opportunity for service providers to simplify engagement with their customers and partners, making them more agile and, therefore, better prepared to react and adapt to future changes.
As part of MEF 3.0 PoC (134), Enxoo, a Polish solution provider for digital telecom transformation based on Salesforce® technology, automated inter-provider commerce and business by implementing PoS Frictionless FTTx Access Commerce, based on MEF’s standardized LSO Sonata APIs.
The tasks performed under PoS included:
- Assessment of business processes,
- Decomposition of workflows,
- Identification of API messages,
- Embedding the LSO Sonata APIs in specific business processes (flow definition),
- Design of final confirmation with the customer, and
- Technical implementation of the LSO Sonata APIs (Geographic Address Mngt, Notifications, Product Ordering API).
The Project Outcome
The project resulted in the successful implementation of standardized APIs for Nexera, enabling its customers to rapidly connect and deploy services across its FTTH infrastructure in Poland. The pioneering solution received great recognition in the industry and was awarded the “Global Carrier Awards 2020” for Best OSS / BSS Deployment.
The fully integrated, multi-cloud solution was deployed with an API-first approach (based on MEF/TM Forum APIs), supporting the integration with Nokia Network Management systems and all Nexera’s customers, including UPC and other major domestic service providers. The API-centric solution enables zero-touch process automation, allowing operators to rapidly quote, provision, and invoice wholesale services across their network footprint. In this way, Nexera’s partners achieve immediate and frictionless access to Nexera’s network infrastructure to effectively extend their footprint on demand. It reduces costs, increases efficiency, and enables service innovation.
Another aspect, emphasized during the project by Nexera’s CEO, Jacek Wiśniewski, is the need to future-proof this aspect of interoperability by implementing standard open APIs rather than proprietary ones.
Nexera’s partners can derive significant benefits from the API:
- Partners get immediate access to Nexera’s network infrastructure to provision and order services in a frictionless way.
- They can quickly address new-customer demands.
- They can offer comprehensive network solutions over their own, but also Nexera’s network.
- They can benefit from reduced operating costs and increased efficiency.
Despite uncertainty in terms of new requirements and thanks to the standardized set of LSO APIs, Nexera is able to adjust its systems to requirements as they evolve.
To achieve standardized automation of CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) for bitstream access services, Enxoo blended an innovative product payload for bitstream access together with MEF-standardized LSO Sonata API envelopes for the different phases of the business and operational lifecycle of the service. This PoC is the first published example of utilizing MEF’s approach to enabling non-standardized product payloads with standardized LSO Sonata APIs. In this way, Enxoo demonstrated a production-ready API and defined product payload supporting access services over GPON for various use cases.
Enxoo and Nexera will continue their work on using MEF standardization of automated inter-provider business functionalities with LSO Sonata APIs.
Learn More
- Explore more about LSO Sonata APIs
- Read more about the MEF 3.0 Proof of Concept Program
About Enxoo
Enxoo provides telecommunications-specific digital transformation solutions based on Salesforce® technology. As one of the fastest-growing independent Salesforce partners since 2012, Enxoo’s mission is to provide a combination of solutions and consulting services to optimize sales cycles, support growth & revenue, and improve operational processes.
About Nexera
Nexera is Poland’s first exclusively wholesale telecommunications operator developing a large-scale fiber-optic access network (NGA) of high throughput (min. 100 Mb/s). The shareholders of Nexera are companies with long-standing experience in the global telecommunications market: Infracapital and Nokia.
