Businesses are not constrained by geography, often being spread across multiple sites and regions.
But they all have one basic requirement – a robust network that will enable these disparate locations to work, communicate, and share information easily, instantaneously, and effectively.
However, the modern remote office branch office (ROBO) network can’t just connect one point to another it has to be able to support the high-speed bandwidth needed by offices, security concerns, and a resource hungry cloud, even if they are in remote locations.
“Robust ROBO network connectivity is required to ensure that businesses can operate effectively even in remote areas. A business cannot run properly without communications, this is the very lifeblood of any organisation,” says Rentia Booysen, Collaboration and Networking Lead at Westcon-Comstor Sub-Saharan Africa.
“Partnering with Nokia, and its FastMile offering for ROBO environments, we can give operators a tool to tap into a new customer base and bring the Internet to millions who do not have access to global communications networks. It’s also a cost-effective way of making use of underutilised spectrums in rural areas.”
With Nokia FastMile, a customer can leverage an existing mobile network grid to offer fixed broadband services. With this a mobile operator can extend its services, while addressing the need for improved connectivity in communities.
It delivers a connectivity solution that lets operators use LTE radio technology to deliver high-speed broadband connectivity in hard-to-reach areas, maximising spectrum use in the process.
According to Booysen, a benefit of FastMile is that it enables high data rates, 2.5-times the throughput and 12 times the coverage area of comparable mobile networks used for remote broadband connections.
It then makes use of boosted LTE for the last mile to the ROBO. It also helps to overcome the connectivity gap and brings much-needed high-speed broadband to customers in rural areas by allowing a customer to increase capacity using advanced antenna topology and interference mitigation technologies.
What’s more, it is easy to deploy and is made up of an easy-to-install home indoor router and outdoor antenna, a portfolio of smartphone applications for customers, plus a Radio Access Network (RAN) macro configuration (with small cell support) and cloud-based controller running on Nokia AirFrame for the network itself.
“Scalability in the era of cloud automation is a real problem for businesses. They can’t just continue to throw data at the problem as there are thousands of applications, hundreds of locations, a multitude of cloud services, IoT-enabled people, and distributed compute services serving mobile users, that need to be connected and a network needs to scale to support them,” adds Booysen.
“Looking ahead, the enterprise network needs to move away from a hub-and-spoke topology design, to a more scalable full-mesh topology to truly increase performance.
“Fortunately, we are living in the era of virtualisation, which means an SD-WAN 2.0 solution such as Nokia’s Nuage, can be added to an environment to better manage the scale required as well as potential device sprawl in a hyperconnected business.”
Nokia’s Nuage Networks VNS (Virtualized Network Services) is an SD-WAN solution that helps to automate the provisioning, configuration, and management of WAN connections to provide an optimal quality of service (QoS) at the lowest cost while meeting strict business policy and security requirements for each application.
In short, VNS provides policy-based automation while seamlessly connecting WAN branch sites to on-premises private data centres, public clouds, and provider-managed VPN networks. When all tied together for a complete solution – customers can benefit from true, robust ROBO connectivity.