NEW YORK – Verizon’s massive multi-year redesign of its network architecture has led to its ability to deploy many network feature enhancements that improve the customer experience instantaneously, without interrupting customers’ service. This transformation includes its development of a Kubernetes-based Webscale Cloud platform for all core network functions, cloud-native architecture, extensive orchestration and automation, and end-to-end virtualization. With these technological advancements, as application upgrades come in, Verizon engineers are now able to deliver improvements to customers on a frequent basis, leveraging continuous delivery techniques and automation. Changes that once took weeks, now take only a few hours to implement, with zero downtime. These upgrades can be as varied as those designed to improve mobility handovers, reduce call drops, improve network resiliency security, introduce new fixed wireless access (FWA) features, improve latency, or any other customer experience improvement. The transformation also provides greater flexibility, improved scalability and improved cost efficiency in networks.
“This has been one of the biggest transformations in our company’s history and our goal through the entire process has been to introduce the most advanced technologies available while making the changes as transparent as possible for our customers,” said Adam Koeppe, SVP of Network and Technology Planning at Verizon. “With the changes we’ve made to the bedrock of our networks, we are able to very efficiently manage our network and rapidly deploy enhancements for our customers without interrupting their services, leading to greater reliability, enhanced services, and higher customer satisfaction.”
In a non-virtualized, hardware dependent world, it could have taken months to physically touch every router and server with these software changes, and often the network had to be taken out of service for a period of time, leaving customers without connectivity while upgrades were made. With Verizon’s extensive and largely invisible network transformation, what once would have taken months, now can be delivered to Verizon customers in a matter of hours or days across the network. Introducing new features, functions and upgrades is being done while the network is fully functional and managing traffic, which means customers’ connectivity is never interrupted while receiving the benefits of these software changes.
Transforming the network
These advancements are a result of the multi-year transformation which involved introducing significant changes in the core architecture of the network, building the Verizon Cloud Platform, subsequently introducing Webscale cloud-native based architecture, driving orchestration to enable the coordination of these technologies, and making virtualization prolific throughout the core.
The Verizon Cloud Platform has been enhanced with native container-based infrastructure optimized for Telco workloads to meet performance, scale and unique regulatory requirements. It provides tighter integration with Verizon’s operations systems. This gives Verizon technology parity with modern hyperscale cloud platforms to drive service agility and efficiency and allows functionality to be distributed throughout the network. Verizon’s native telco workloads (Core, RAN, signaling, and user plane) run more efficiently and with better performance and resiliency when deployed on this optimized cloud platform.
This distributed platform supports edge services, private cloud services, Network Function Virtualization tools, Cloud Native Functions, Web applications, mapping and spatial analysis tools, orchestration tools, service assurance tools, auto-remediation, and compute offerings. In addition to current improvements in efficiency, reliability, service-assurance and performance for current customers, this Webscale architecture will also host the Verizon 5G core which will be able to achieve new levels of operational automation and adaptability to create differentiated customer experiences. This directional technology platform will support the stand alone core, the non-stand alone core, network slicing and VoNR services.
