By Oystein Bergmann, Bureau Chief, Scandinavia

Nokia Friday announced enhancements to its WaveSuite optical network automation platform aimed at meeting urgent customer needs for increased bandwidth, reliability and imperceptible latency. Nokia’s enhanced WaveSuite platform provides exceptional insight into and control of customer networks with a growing roster of applications targeting specific use cases to help them optimize their network and operations, scale network capacity and monetize network assets.

In the face of increased network complexity and constrained resources, network operators are increasingly reliant on automation to make more efficient use of networking expertise and reduce human error associated with tedious manual processes, improve service turn-up times, shrink operational cost reductions and drive revenue growth.

Today’s enhancements to WaveSuite streamline network operations to cut labor time and the inherent human errors, accelerate the introduction of new capacity to reduce time-to-revenue, and to help eliminate risks associated with network failures that impact end-customer service level agreements (SLAs).

Key among the new WaveSuite enhancements is support within the Service Enablement application for network operators to better integrate BSS (business support systems) billing with optical network functions. Network operators will be able to fulfill optical service requests to wholesale partners and their end subscribers, and provide them with individualized, real-time KPI assurance metrics. It enables them to offer differentiated services, such as latency-aware layer one services and spectrum-as-a-service, creating new revenue opportunities in a formerly untapped market.

Nokia’s enhanced WaveSuite portfolio also incorporates machine learning into the Health and Analytics application to use network intelligence to support optical fiber sensing, which will help network operators detect disturbances to the fiber optic cable within their networks that may produce outages. Unlike other approaches that require additional hardware, the innovative WaveSuite solution takes advantage of polarization data provided by the coherent digital signal processor at the heart of Nokia Photonic Service Engines, such as PSE-6s. It allows network operators to proactively identify, prepare for and respond to events in the network that may affect network performance before they occur, decreasing down time and promoting better adherence to service level agreements with customers.

Finally, WaveSuite’s new features combine network planning with network provisioning, significantly reducing the effort required to scale network capacity by 33 per cent. This enables automated flow-through provisioning by synchronizing between existing physical networks and planned network designs, eliminates errors in the transition between planning and provisioning, and significantly reduces the time and human resources network operators need to dedicate to scaling their optical networks. This enhancement was analyzed in a Jan 2024 Analysys Mason report where the research firm quantified the benefits of optical network automation.

Research Director, Analysys Mason, Justin van der Lande said: “Our recent research collaboration with Nokia revealed operators could achieve up to 81 per cent cost savings after deploying optical network automation for their network and service lifecycle management. Nokia’s new capabilities have the potential to go even further to improving the OPEX and revenue-enhancing gains we uncovered during our research.”

Optical Network Automation Leader at Nokia, Ravi Parmasad said: “We continue to work with leading service providers to help them transform their optical networks with automation. Nokia’s WaveSuite platform enables our customers to leverage data-driven insights and intelligent actions to optimize their network performance, reduce operational costs and accelerate service delivery. With WaveSuite, we are bringing the benefits of automation to the optical domain and empowering our customers to build more agile and resilient networks for the future.”