It’s that time of year. Communication service providers and vendors are joining forces to solve real-world telecom business problems in complex catalysts that will be showcased at the upcoming Digital Transformation World in Nice. While the location of this event is always popular (who doesn’t love Nice?), the catalyst event is frankly a major “catalyst” for Digital Transformation World, with live demos of solutions to industry challenges that cover a variety of topics, including AI, Machine Learning, and smart cities. This year, Incognito Software Systems Inc. is part of the 5G Riders on the Storm Catalyst, backed by champions A1, BT, KDDI, Orange, Telenor, and TIM, and supported by industry-leading vendor partners Incognito, Accenture, Huawei, Netcracker, TEOCO, and gen-E.
Incognito is an independent software specialist, focused on in-home and enterprise broadband service orchestration for cable, fiber, and fixed wireless. Incognito’s relevance in 5G may come as a bit of a surprise to our customers and industry pundits who track Incognito. I can confirm that Incognito is providing support for a number of innovative use cases around 5G network slicing in this catalyst. 5G network slicing brings yet another type of resource to be orchestrated – a natural extension of Incognito’s pedigree in orchestrating different network services to fulfill orders.
The 2019 5G Riders on the Storm Catalyst focuses on a severe weather event and the use cases needed to support emergency services, utilities, smart city operators, and service providers on the fly. Turning up a service in seconds is what this catalyst is all about. Incognito’s role in the proof-of-concept is key. Incognito provides a turnkey resource orchestration platform that maps different types of network slice requests using a catalog-driven approach to identify the right resources to deliver with the end goal of fulfilling a complete network slice service into operation.
The Incognito Service Activation Center (SAC) is integrated into the Huawei 5G Network Slice Manager to provision network slices for enterprise and emergency services. Through this integration, upon request from a higher order service orchestrator, the Incognito SAC functions as a resource controller/broker and provisions a range of network slices, providing multiple configurable options to select the right network slice for the right device group – including smartphones, IoT devices, wearables (e.g. push2talk), dongles, tablets. Incognito will also be able to collect and provide necessary slice information such as number of user equipment (UEs), device models, upload/download speeds, end to end latency, and location connection density (UE/sq km), as well as manage how long the network service is available by specifying the slice start/expiration date!
The Catalyst also examines the scenario of a fiber cut during a severe weather event. In this event, Incognito is part of a closed-loop service assurance use case and will provision the radio access network (RAN) to re-route traffic via a gNodeB, instead of over the cut fiber link. This will allow service providers to provide customers with an assured level of services and avoid costly network outages.
In a word (or two) - “Future-Proof”.
Whether you are investing in 5G spectrum and services, or plan to service 5G providers with backhaul, Incognito is part of 5G network evolution, helping to orchestrate different types of resources to deliver future services end-to-end – network slices. While many 5G slice management use cases have been identified across enterprise, health, emergency services, and mobility services, the feeling throughout the industry is that we have barely scraped the surface. Having a robust B/OSS in place to meet and grow with the management of the 5G slice management use cases is key to growing profits quickly and efficiently. 5G network slice activation is a natural extension of Incognito’s proven pedigree in service activation, albeit with highly dynamic and customizable services. Incognito provides the right solution to configure network slice customizations on a per customer basis. Now that’s scalability.
Interested in learning more about how Incognito is enabling the 5G network evolution? Contact me - ronan.bracken@incognito.com