Introducing Segment Routing to Affordably Connect South African Homes & Businesses | Juniper Summit

0:00 [intro music]

0:07 -Hello, everyone.

0:08 I'm Robert Horner.

0:09 I'm responsible for Juniper's largest global alliance,

0:14 which is with NEC corporation at of Tokyo.

0:18 I will be having a discussion with a joint Juniper NEC customer

0:23 at of South Africa,

0:25 and that is Herotel.

0:27 Here with me today is Herotel,

0:30 CTO Eldred Ekermans

0:33 and Herotel, National Head of Core and Transmission

0:38 James Devine.

0:40 I wanted to have a discussion about your recent deployment

0:46 and also your mission.

0:49 Juniper and NEC XON and Herotel have partnered together

0:56 to provide greater connectivity across South Africa.

1:00 Eldred, can you tell us what Herotel's mission is

1:04 and your strategy that you're taking to achieve your goals?

1:09 -Thank you, Robert. Thanks for the opportunity.

1:12 Herotel's vision is everyone connected.

1:16 We feel that we'll keep on building fixed telecoms networks until

1:19 all the people in South Africa that needs to be connected are connected.

1:23 We believe in taking a differentiated approach,

1:26 so we don't use one specific technology.

1:28 We look at the situation of the customer,

1:31 the environment that they are in,

1:33 and we use the appropriate technology for them.

1:35 In high dense areas, we will do FTTH

1:38 and in lower dense areas, we'll do fixed wireless.

1:41 We are currently expanding our presence across

1:44 most of the towns in South Africa.

1:46 Every time that it's not serviced by a proper broadband,

1:49 reliable internet, we will be able to deploy

1:52 our networks there.

1:54 Obviously, depending on the town itself,

1:57 it depends on the technology that we'll use.

1:59 We currently connect 170,000 homes and businesses endpoints to the internet.

2:04 We are planning to add another 60,000 to that in the 2021.

2:11 -Great.

2:13 How did you come to choose NEC XON and Juniper specifically as your partners?

2:21 -At the end of 2018, we realized that we have to go through

2:25 a massive network upgrade, and we started dreaming

2:28 at what we think our next generation network

2:30 should look like.

2:33 Any big decision like that,

2:36 we always turn to our three strategic business anchors,

2:40 and we try and find the best balance between those anchors.

2:42 The first of those is excellent customer experience

2:45 and from a networking perspective,

2:47 to give the customer the best experience you can.

2:50 The only way to do that is to try and bring the latency down.

2:53 Try and bring the content as close as possible to the customer.

2:56 Our second strategic anchor is low cost deployments.

3:00 We have to be very creative in how we deploy our networks,

3:02 especially in Africa.

3:06 We don't want to spend a dollar today that we're going to have to re-spend

3:11 in two or three years.

3:12 Because we were short-sighted, but what we also don't want

3:15 to do this overengineer our networks

3:17 and spend a lot of money and never actually use those assets.

3:19 We believe in spending a lot of time in

3:22 thinking and planning on our networks.

3:23 Then the last strategic anchor is service availability.

3:26 Our network simply always has to be up.

3:28 We can't afford our networks to be down.

3:31 The result of that kind of thinking brought us to a network design

3:36 that brings CDN or content distribution networks,

3:42 closer to the customer as we distribute those throughout Africa.

3:45 Then we repair as much as we can nationally.

3:47 Then for any international content,

3:49 we find an international provider to do that.

3:52 When we went to market, we had a bunch of suppliers

3:56 and vendors that we spoke to,

3:58 but the NEC XON just basically understood our vision.

4:03 They really snapped very quickly what we wanted to achieve.

4:06 Most of the other vendors came with multiple technologies

4:09 that they were mixing, whereas NEC XON provided us

4:16 with Juniper for our routing and switching gear.

4:18 That basically just clinched the deal for us.

4:23 -Great.

4:26 Over the last year, the world has changed

4:29 from physical to virtual,

4:32 and this has put a great deal of responsibility on service providers.

4:36 What kind of changes have you seen in your environment,

4:42 like shifting traffic patterns, those kinds of things,

4:45 due to the movement to virtual?

4:52 -When we went into lockdown as a country,

4:54 pretty much a day to day, a year ago,

4:58 we immediately saw a 30% jump in traffic on our networks.

5:02 Fortunately, our transmission and call networks handle

5:05 that traffic pretty easily.

5:07 We didn't have any issues there.

5:08 Some of our access networks needed

5:11 a bit of tweaking and a bit of upgrading,

5:13 but we could attend to that pretty quickly.

5:15 What we saw is that a lot of people started working from home,

5:20 but specifically video content really made the leap in traffic.

5:25 The fact that we've got content distribution nodes

5:28 throughout the country,

5:29 that also made it much easier for us to handle the traffic.

5:35 You don't have to pause the traffic of long-distance links.

5:38 We serve that locally.

5:39 I think our network design kind of proved itself very quickly

5:44 when the pandemic hit us.

5:46 The other interesting thing that we've seen is that people

5:51 initially it was like they all craved going online.

5:56 There was a real spike, but it's kind of stabilized.

5:59 We see that actually quite often, the moment we rolled out

6:02 a proper broadband network in an area, it's like they can't get enough of it.

6:07 Then after six months to a year, it stabilizes,

6:10 and people's usage patterns kind of gets balanced.

6:13 That massive increase, we haven't really seen that carry on.

6:17 We've seen a real stabilization in terms of what people use.

6:22 We're very grateful that we deployed our Juniper network,

6:27 when we did, and we could accommodate the big traffic in lockdown.

6:32 -Excellent. Great to hear, Eldred.

6:34 Thanks so much.

6:35 James, a couple of questions for you.

6:39 Herotel has the first commercial segment routing deployment

6:45 across South Africa.

6:48 How did you choose segment routing over traditional MPLS?

6:53 -That's a great question, Robert.

6:55 Segment routing addresses several of the shortfalls

6:59 of the traditional MPLS deployments that we've seen over the years.

7:04 One of the big ones is that they like to centralize

7:07 in one or two locations.

7:09 That just didn't sit well with the African environment

7:14 and the African layout.

7:17 To overcome the shortfalls of the traditional MPLS

7:20 and allow us to use our network bandwidth more efficiently,

7:23 there was only one thing to turn towards, and that was segment routing.

7:28 It doesn't limit us to a single topology design

7:31 as traditional MPLS does.

7:32 It supports both meshed and ringed topologies,

7:35 and most importantly, it scales well.

7:37 We've seen tremendous growth in the last nine months on the network.

7:42 This also allowed us to build a solid foundation for automation goals.

7:45 All of these three aspects support our three strategic anchors

7:49 that we use when making any of our business

7:52 or even technical decisions.

7:54 That is low cost but not cheap, quality customer experience,

7:59 and availability, which quite (unclear).

8:00 We're always up.

8:02 -Why did you choose Juniper for segment routing?

8:05 -We compared several vendor platforms while we were looking

8:08 at our SR deployment.

8:10 It basically came down to the three simple facts.

8:15 With the Juniper's NEC XON solution, we had a single vendor,

8:19 with end-to-end, including all of our routine switch infrastructure

8:22 and eliminated all of the cost of inter-vendor operability problems

8:28 and finger-pointing.

8:30 The second one was at the MX platform is simply a rock star.

8:33 It's unparalleled at what you can do with this.

8:36 The track record that we've had with it, that it's had in the industry,

8:40 the bang for the buck that you get,

8:41 and with the simple addition of the license,

8:43 any of the MX2 deployed through our network

8:46 can instantly become another decentralized BNG.

8:50 With each BNG,

8:52 we have decentralized content delivery nodes, caches.

8:57 The third and probably one of the most important one is that,

9:01 as you saw, it's so new to the continent,

9:04 and especially to South Africa.

9:06 We saw a few production networks in the world.

9:09 It was imperative that we had an incredibly strong partner

9:12 with the required skills that could assist us with qualified stuff.

9:18 Most importantly, that they had to be based

9:20 and in the ground, on the ground in South Africa.

9:24 Because this is a pretty groundbreaking deployment for us,

9:30 and we wanted a partner and not a consultant.

9:34 There was only one real choice, and everything filter.

9:38 -Great to hear.

9:41 James, now that you have

9:42 the first South African commercial segment routing deployment in operation,

9:49 what impact have you seen on your network?

9:54 -We've seen a drop in latency and increase in throughput.

9:58 First off, we cannot compare custom silicon

10:02 to software-based routing platform.

10:05 The increase in performance has been phenomenal and groundbreaking.

10:09 Signal routing also allows us to play a key role in avoiding

10:13 the complexity of interconnecting existing city networks

10:16 while allowing for the flexibility and the deployment of decentralized BNGs

10:20 and CDN nodes inside of our network.

10:23 This centralized, this SR network that we deployed has allowed us

10:28 to amalgamate 19 separate operational entities

10:31 and networks in South Africa,

10:33 into a national SR network in this year.

10:36 All of this relates back to the most important metric

10:39 on our network, and that is the

10:41 improvement in customer experience.

10:46 -Great to hear.

10:47 What's next for Herotel?

10:51 -That's a big question.

10:54 As our SR rings are being completed and they're being rolled out,

10:57 the additional rings are being rolled out.

11:00 We've just begun with migrating our customers to our distributed BNG

11:03 and CDN nodes around the country, already seen incredible performance,

11:07 increased by not having to take the traffic all the way

11:10 around the country and back again to our users.

11:13 We plan to have all of our fiber, FDH and FTTP customers

11:18 on our on-net networks (unclear) to the BNGs this year.

11:23 We have 10 of them set right around the country,

11:26 and our wireless networks to be followed shortly thereafter,

11:29 early next year.

11:31 We have a strong push for visibility and management into the network this year,

11:34 with the goal of automating by service provisioning,

11:37 and intelligent metric-based network routing.

11:41 SR again has made this simple for us, and we're incredibly strong foundation

11:46 for automation making the development of tools simpler.

11:50 We're also working with NEC XON and Juniper with the beginning trials

11:55 of the Juniper network automation system paradigm.

11:58 -That's quite a list of next steps for you.

12:02 Gentlemen, it's been a pleasure having a discussion with you.

12:08 I look forward to a long and very productive partnership

12:11 going forward.

12:12 Thanks so much for joining us today.

12:15 -Thanks so much.