Vodafone-Netherlands (Ziggo) announced that they are taking their RAN automation to the next level and are building the required capabilities toward automation in the 5G Era with the commercial implementation of Cisco SONFlex.

How Vodafone-Netherlands Ziggo uses SONFlex

Vodafone-Netherlands has leveraged the SONFlex platform to implement new Automation use cases quickly. Internally they are building a funnel of ideas, prioritizing them according to business justification, implementing and validating them in a matter of days/weeks.

SONFlex enables Vodafone-Netherlands to accelerate the process of automating a RAN use case from research, to deployment from months to weeks.  The ease and flexibility that SONFlex provides has helped to open the possibilities encouraging everyone to work together and share new ideas on ways to automate new service use cases for their customers.  The additional value of this outcome will be demonstrated in the future network benchmarks.

Raising the Bar for RAN Automation 

Creating new SON applications for specific service requirements requires long hours of planning, programing and testing with radio engineers and programmers before actual implementation.  Cisco SONFlex changes that model.  SONFlex comes with a library of existing SON modules that can be quickly deployed.  You can also create your own custom SON modules with an easy to use, drag-and-drop graphic user interface (GUI) called SONFlex Studio.  With the SONFlex Studio radio engineers can tap into their own ideas and create their own SON applications without programming skills.  Additionally, SONFlex makes it easy to test, modify and avoid any risk of conflicts with other SON applications.  New SON applications can go from "idea" to implementation in minutes or hours (rather than weeks and months).  And any application your team developed can be shared between each other.

Of course, you still get all of the Cisco SON closed-loop platform automation platform that runs on any RAN vendor and will continue to function seamlessly even when a new OSS is released (multi-vendor, multi-technology).

All these advanced automation capabilities become even more valuable as Vodafone-Netherlands rolls out their 5G network.  5G will add new technologies, new layers of complexities and introduce new opportunities -if your network automation is ready to take advantage of them.  With Cisco SONFlex and SONFlex Studio, Vodafone-Netherlands is one of our customers taking the vision forward and defining new standards of excellence in RAN automation and connected experiences for their customers.  They are another amazing story of our product evolution toward the 5G

Read more about Cisco SONFlex.