Customer Success Story
Avantel Uses Network Slicing to Deliver Low-Cost Mobile Services for Millennials in Colombia
Avantel is a rising star in Colombia. The mobile service provider is a favorite among university students and Millennials who expect a great mobile experience at an affordable price. The company aims to capture 10 percent of the market, facing down far bigger rivals.
Overview
| Company | Avantel |
| Industry | Telecommunications |
| Products used | EX4300 Multigigabit, MX480, MX960, QFX5100 |
| Region | Americas |
Scaled
network to meet growth plans and satisfy mobile data usage demands
Pioneered
use of Junos Node Slicing to scale infrastructure
Prepared
for the coming of 5G and IoT
Simplified
network operations and lowered OpEx
Avantel quickly attracted 1 million subscribers in Bogota, Medellin, Cali, Cartagena, and a dozen other cities in Colombia. The company offers both consumer and enterprise communication services as well as content, video, and hosted applications. Avantel’s subscribers are digital citizens—heavy users of video chat, streaming video, and messaging apps.
Data consumption was skyrocketing, but Avantel’s legacy network couldn’t keep pace with the company’s aggressive growth plans. “We had a capacity problem,” says Christian Torres, planning engineer for the core IP network at Avantel. “Our customer base is growing quickly and traffic is increasing at a high rate. Our core routers wouldn’t have been able to handle the physical connections we needed to deliver a good customer experience.”
Avantel’s core network was designed for an era in which voice, not data, dominated, and the company had relied on the same core network for a decade. Oscar Bravo (chief of implementation and planning) and Torres knew the core network needed to offer better performance, reliability, and flexibility to deliver mobile plans that satisfied the mobile generation. And the network needed to be ready for IoT and 5G. Avantel was ready to break with the status quo.
Impressed with Juniper’s strong service provider heritage and focus on engineering simplicity, Avantel determined that Juniper networking in the core would enable the business growth and operational simplicity it coveted. “The Juniper solution was the best for performance, capacity, and cost-effectiveness,” says Bravo. “With a Juniper network, we are able to improve the performance and capacity in our network to support the demand for 4G and data services in our major cities.”
Avantel is the first service provider in Latin America to deploy Junos Node Slicing “We immediately saw the benefits of Junos Node Slicing in terms of capacity, availability, and flexibility,” says Bravo. Junos Node Slicing allows Avantel to create multiple partitions in a single physical Juniper Networks MX Series 5G Universal Routing Platform. It also empowers Avantel to create a more agile, virtualized, and converged infrastructure, as well as to consolidate multiple network functions on a single physical router. The Juniper Networks EX4300 Ethernet Switch is used as the satellite device for Junos Node Slicing.
The high-performance Juniper Networks MX960 and MX480 Universal Routing Platforms are used in the IP core network, where they deliver highly scalable routing, switching, security, and service features for service provider and cloud environments. Avantel also uses Juniper Networks QFX5100 line of Switches, deployed in a Virtual Chassis configuration for simplified management, in its data center.
With efficient, scalable data center infrastructure from Juniper, Avantel is ready to meet its business plans for aggressive growth and deliver excellent services as mobile data volumes grow rapidly. “We are launching an unlimited traffic plan, and the demand from customers will be very high,” says Bravo. “Our challenge is to ensure that we have the capacity to support our customer growth, and Junos Node Slicing is our solution.”
Avantel has built a solid foundation for the growth of IoT devices and data-heavy 5G services. “Our expectation is to continue to grow the network with Juniper in the core and support the shift to 5G,” says Torres. The Juniper network has also delivered OpEx savings. “With a Juniper platform, Avantel gained energy efficiency, saved power and space, and can optimize traffic to support different services,” says Bravo. “Voice over LTE is much easier with Junos.”
“Juniper is much simpler, and integrating the core and access networks and deploying new services were much easier because of Junos.”
The Products
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.
QFX5100
The QFX5100 line of top-of-rack 10/40GbE switches for the data center offers low latency, deployment versatility, and rich automation features. These switches provide universal building blocks for industry-standard architectures such as spine-and-leaf fabrics.
Published October 2019