Customer Success Story
Crown Castle brings 5G to life with Juniper 400G
As the largest provider of shared communications infrastructure in the U.S., Crown Castle is on the forefront of building out the infrastructure that makes 5G a reality. Wireless carriers rely on Crown Castle’s nationwide footprint of towers, small cells and fiber to deliver the exciting 5G services that subscribers crave and that will enable new, high-revenue business models.
To deliver on the 5G promise, Crown Castle upgraded its nationwide network with Juniper 400G routing and security that expands 5G safely and reliably to more people, businesses, and communities.
Overview
| Company | Crown Castle |
| Industry | Telecommunications |
| Products used | PTX Series, MX Series |
| Region | Americas |
6,000
Cell tower networks connected using 400Gbps as of June 2023, with a continued rollout to tens of thousands of towers
400G
Transport and edge networks deliver massive capacity with investment protection
Overcame
Supply chain constraints to meet 5G buildout timelines for major U.S. mobile providers
~85,000
Route miles of fiber across the U.S.
Unprecedented supply chain constraints didn’t stop enabling our customers’ 5G rollout
Crown Castle was operating under a strict timeline to turn up 5G services to support the plans of its wireless carrier customers.
Supporting customers’ ambitious 5G plans required Crown Castle to upgrade its network capacity. Crown Castle has relied on Juniper networking for more than a decade, and it wanted to move to 400G across their existing national backbone While facing worldwide supply chain shortages that affected network buildouts across the board, Crown Castle continued its massive network upgrade. This achievement was made possible through the exceptional efforts of our supply chain teams, who navigated the challenges with dedication and skill.
Secure 400G that scales up and scales out
Crown Castle modernized its transport and edge networks to 400G. To meet the intense demands of 5G, the company deployed Juniper Network PTX10008 routers and Juniper PTX10001-36MR routers for its transport network. The 400G PTX routers are optimized for scale-up and scale-out architectures, so Crown Castle can continue to expand its network infrastructure with simplicity and efficiency.
“With PTX routers, we have a pay-as-you-grow approach to expanding throughput to meet customers’ needs and new customer use cases,” says Zach Francis, Director of Network Architecture and Strategy at Crown Castle.
Crown Castle added MPC10-E line cards to its existing Juniper MX480 Universal Routers to scale throughput at its towers. The high-scale, high-density MX480 router can deliver up to 9 Tbps throughput, with support for 15 400GbE interfaces and 75 100GbE interfaces for long-term investment protection.
Crown Castle protects its network—and its customers—against the growing sophistication and volume of DDoS attacks with the Juniper and Corero joint DDoS protection solution. Corero SmartWall Threat Defense Director (TDD) software running on its MX routers delivers real-time DDoS detection and line-rate mitigation.
5G ready and poised for edge computing opportunities
Crown Castle scaled its network capacity to support its customers’ 5G service rollouts despite tight timelines and supply chain challenges. With the Juniper PTX routers, Crown Castle is primed and ready for future demands of 800G and beyond. “We know Juniper routers are a safe and reliable investment for our national backbone and edge metros.” says Francis.
The 400G network is also ready to support its edge computing strategy, as customers roll out innovations like augmented reality, virtual reality, IoT, and autonomous vehicles, which require the real-time transmission and processing of massive volumes of data.
“We expect to be unique in the edge world,” says Francis. “We have the physical infrastructure that distributed computing requires - fiber, real estate, space & power and the right connectivity at 400G capacity to solve our customers workload needs.”
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.
PTX10001-36MR
The PTX10001-36MR is a high-capacity, space- and power-optimized routing and switching platform. It delivers 9.6 Tbps of throughput and 10.8 Tbps of I/O capacity in a 1 U, fixed form factor. Based on the Juniper Express 4 ASIC, the platform provides dense 100GbE and 400GbE connectivity for highly scalable routing and switching in cloud, service provider, and enterprise networks and data centers.
MX480
The SDN-enabled MX480 Universal Routing Platform offers unprecedented scale for service provider and cloud applications, enabling the delivery of advanced business and residential multi-service edge services. The MX480 Universal Routing Platform delivers 7.5 Tbps of system capacity that supports inline MACsec without performance penalties for 10/40/100 GbE interfaces. It is also a carrier-grade platform with extensive automation capabilities.
Juniper and Corero Joint DDoS Protection Solution
Juniper and Corero DDoS protection combines packet-level traffic inspection with the power of infrastructure-based enforcement. It automates real-time attack mitigation at the network edge at speeds up to 40 Tbps.
Published November 2023