Customer Success Story
400G network positions Kazakhtelecom to better serve Central Asia
Digitalization is accelerating economic growth and improving the quality of life across Kazakhstan. As the largest network operator in Central Asia, Kazakhtelecom is at the heart of this transformation.
A Juniper customer for nearly 20 years, Kazakhtelecom is building a 400G-ready network to meet growing demand for 4G/5G mobile, high-speed Internet, pay TV, enterprise IT, telco cloud, and wholesale transit services within the country and around the world.
Overview
| Company | Kazakhtelecom |
| Industry | Service Provider |
| Products used | PTX10004, PTX10008, PTX10016, MX960, QFX5120 |
| Region | EMEA |
2X
Increase in core network capacity with a smooth path for continued growth
More than 50%
Decrease in power consumption of core network after PTX10000 migration
400G
Network sets the stage for continued expansion in Central Asia
20
Years using Juniper routing and switching infrastructure
Meet digital needs from the mountains to the steppes
“We have been upgrading our network capacity over the last several years,” says Rollanbek Bekbolatov, lead manager of the Innovation Division at Kazakhtelecom. “We wanted our network to be 400G-ready to meet our customers’ digital needs and to prepare for 5G.”
With 45% of Kazakhstan’s population living in rural areas, Kazakhtelecom delivers high-speed Internet to thousands of villages. It has been migrating fixed broadband customers to fiber so they can enjoy Internet speeds up to 500 Mbps from home.
Kazakhtelecom Group of companies, which includes two major mobile operators, has the largest subscriber base in Central Asia with 14.5 million subscribers and is a leader in launching 5G and telco cloud services.
Businesses of all sizes are digitizing, driving a wide array of customer connectivity needs that the carrier must address. Among them are point-of-sale, data center, and cloud services, as well as IoT sensors for smart agriculture. Moreover, Kazakhtelecom’s wholesale transit business is on the upswing as more global network operators serve the region.
400G delivers network scalability
Kazakhtelecom has been migrating to Juniper 400G-ready routing and switching for its core, edge, and metro networks and international peering points. Juniper 400G solutions are designed to scale, with proven reliability and agility to adapt to future needs.
The core upgrade involved deploying the 400G-ready Juniper PTX10008 with LC1202-36MR line cards Packet Transport Routers, which double the carrier’s core network capacity and provide plenty of headroom for growth. Kazakhtelecom uses the high-scale, high-density Juniper MX960 Universal Router at the provider edge and peering points as well as for advanced broadband network gateway functions.
Business and cloud services are delivered through the provider’s metro data centers. An IP fabric, composed of Juniper QFX Series Switches QFX5120-32C, QFX5120-48Y for the physical network and EVPN-VXLAN for the overlay network, delivers scalable, simple, and flexible connectivity to support customer and internal workloads.
Accelerate growth and improve quality of life
A next-generation 400G network supports Kazakhtelecom’s consumer, enterprise, and wholesale businesses.
Kazakhtelecom has migrated about half of its 1.8 million Internet customers to fiber, and it continues to bring digital connectivity advances to villages and rural areas. The company anticipates that its 5G services will be available to 80% of the Kazakhstan population by 2027.
Modernization is proving to be more environmentally sustainable. “After migrating to the PTX10000 routers, the power consumption of the core network decreased by half,” says Nurlan Meirmanov, Chief innovation officer.
These investments help position Kazakhtelecom as a communications leader in Central Asia. In 2023, it established its first presence in Frankfurt and Hong Kong, directly connecting with cloud hyperscalers and global network operators.
“These points of presence improve connectivity for people inside our country and provide faster transit to our wholesale customers,” says Nurlan Meirmanov. “We have the potential to become a regional traffic exchange point.”
The company is also participating in the Digital Silk Way infrastructure project, a multicarrier undertaking that includes building subsea links across the Caspian Sea that connect Asia and Europe.
The Products
PTX10004, PTX10008, PTX10016
The modular PTX10004, PTX10008, and PTX10016 Packet Transport Routers directly address the massive bandwidth demands placed on networks today and in the foreseeable future. They bring ultra-high port density, native 400GE and 800GE inline MACsec, and latest generation ASIC investment to the most demanding WAN and data center architectures.
MX960
The SDN-enabled MX960 Universal Routing Platform is a high performance, carrier-grade, multiservice edge platform with unprecedented scale for service provider and cloud applications. The MX960 enables inline MACsec support without performance penalties on 10, 40 GbE and 100 GbE, and delivers 12 Tbps of system capacity in a 12 slot chassis supporting dense 100 GbE, 400 GbE interfaces. Similar to the other MX Series Universal Router Platforms, the MX960 has extensive carrier-grade capabilities.
QFX5120
The QFX5120 line offers 1/10/25/40/100GbE switches designed for data center, data center edge, data center interconnect and campus deployments with requirements for low-latency Layer 2/Layer 3 features and advanced EVPN-VXLAN capabilities.
Published August 2023