Telstra lays out plans for Programmable Network

Australian operator Telstra has outlined its plans to offer SDN and NFV, cloud platform and data centers as well as global and Australian networks in one integrated and intelligent platform.

At the ITW Conference in Chicago, Telstra outlined its planned network-as-a-service called the Telstra Programmable Network.

This new network will be programmable at its core and enable the automation and provisioning of services. It will be designed to help businesses quickly add new capabilities to deliver better experiences without significant infrastructure upgrades. It will also allow simple and secure access to multiple cloud services via a simple user interface.

“The Telstra Programmable Network is designed to help our customers meet the rapidly growing global demand for data and the proliferation of applications, as well as embrace cloud computing by offering flexible and dynamic access to our high bandwidth, low latency and secure networks,” said Jim Fagan, Director Global Platforms.

“Our vision for the Telstra Programmable Network is to help businesses optimize their IT by offering automated, on-demand and near real-time provisioning, consumption-based pricing and new data insights on network usage,” said Fagan.

“The Telstra Programmable Network brings together all of our SDN technologies such as PEN, Telstra’s first globally connected on-demand networking platform, and continues their development under one vision, architecture and investment program.”

International IP-VPN customers will also be able to access the Telstra Programmable Network’s capabilities from any of Telstra’s 2,000 points of presence worldwide after launch. This includes extending their network via Telstra’s portal or API to access the internet and a range of public cloud services including Amazon Web Services and IBM SoftLayer.

To complement the rollout, Telstra will implement a significant capability upgrade of its core international IP network in the coming months.

This will introduce increased bandwidth and flexibility, which the new service will demand. In addition, these enhancements are expected to increase Telstra’s peering capacity by up to 70% and provide enhanced security with traffic segregation capability to mitigate DDoS traffic.

“These initial investments will establish the groundwork for the Telstra Programmable Network with future enhancements, such as orchestrated real-time SD-WAN and security, to be announced in the coming months,” said Fagan.