American wireless major AT&T on Wednesday announced a new platform called AT&T Network 3.0 Indigo to enhance customer experience.
John Donovan, chief strategy officer and group president, Technology and Operations at AT&T, termed Indigo as the third generation of modern networking.
“Indigo is our term for a world where it isn’t just your connection speeds that are accelerating, but every element of the network becomes more seamless, efficient and capable. It is a living, evolving, upgradeable platform,” John Donovan said.
“Indigo is unique because it will be data powered and software controlled,” said Andre Fuetsch, president AT&T Labs and chief technology officer.
Wireless technologies like 5G, software contributions such as Big Data, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, cybersecurity and software-defined networking (SDN) are part of Indigo.
AT&T will launch first 5G Evolution Markets in the coming months in Austin and Indianapolis – offering peak speeds of 400Mbps or higher.
Densification of network and deployment of advanced technologies such as carrier aggregation and LTE-License Assisted Access (LAA) will enable AT&T to offer peak speeds up to 1Gbps in some areas in 2017.
AT&T is building 2 new 5G testbeds this spring at AT&T Labs to offer enhanced broadband services for residential and small-to-medium business customers in Austin. Earlier, AT&T started the industry’s first 5G business customer trial in Austin.
The testbeds will include 5G outdoor and indoor test locations. AT&T revealed that it will work with multiple technology vendors to evaluate 5G technology concepts for both fixed and mobile solutions, test network infrastructure and devices and explore 5G signal coverage for the 28GHz, 39GHz, and sub-6GHz frequency bands.
AT&T said data on its mobile network has increased about 250,000 percent since 2007, and most of that traffic is video.
AT&T has already converted 34 percent of network functionality to SDN and will achieve 75 percent by 2020. AT&T’s network virtualization goal for 2017 is 55 percent.
AT&T said ECOMP will be part of an open source project, hosted by the Linux Foundation. The Linux Foundation will release more information about this project in the coming weeks.
ALSO READ: AT&T website for AT&T Control Center and AT&T NetBond
AT&T is helping businesses better manage connected devices on their networks. The cloud-based AT&T Control Center, powered by Cisco Jasper, helps businesses launch, manage and monetize IoT services.
“The industry is growing rapidly with analysts forecasting there will be tens of billions of connected devices by 2020,” said Chris Penrose, president, Internet of Things Solutions, AT&T.
By integrating AT&T Control Center and AT&T NetBond, the wireless operator can give businesses a secure solution to address IoT risks.
“Bringing our IoT solutions into AT&T NetBond keeps businesses’ critical IoT devices, workloads and information off of the public internet and on a private network,” said Mo Katibeh, senior vice president, AT&T Advanced Solutions.
Baburajan K
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