Nokia announced the deployment of its Altiplano Open Access solution for American Tower’s fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) infrastructure in Argentina.
The network controller solution uses virtualization to share network resources as slices of a physical network, enabling the wholesaling of fiber access on a Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) basis.

American Tower has already onboarded three virtual network operator tenants in Argentina.

American Tower’s 220,000 communications site portfolio includes fiber networks in select geographies. The FTTH network in Argentina, with Nokia as the sole supplier, reaches close to a million homes passed.

The neutral host model, where investors build networks and wholesale capacity to tenant operators, is well established in mobile networks and is now a growing proportion of the fiber market.

In a study for Nokia, Arthur D. Little found almost one third of telecom sector deals in the Americas and Europe during the past decade were with fiber investment companies, with up to 3x higher profit for neutral host deals vs traditional telcos.

Traditional fiber wholesale solutions offer difficulties for tenant operators for ensuring service innovation and market differentiation due to the rigid design, lack of network visibility and limited control in service delivery.

Nokia said its Altiplano Open Access solution, an add-on to its Altiplano software suite, enables a more flexible service design tailored to the needs of both large and small operator tenants.

“With Nokia’s collaboration, we are leveraging the Altiplano SDAN Domain Controller to enhance our neutral host Network-as-a-service (NaaS) platform, allowing enhanced automation and delivering autonomy of operation to our virtual operators,” Paul Choiseul, Vice President of Innovation – Transport and Networking – OCTO at American Tower, said.

“Through the use of industry-standard APIs, Altiplano allows us to grant virtual network operators a “slice” of our network they can operate in a similar fashion as they would operate their own infrastructure, so they can offer differentiated wholesale products to address the unique needs of their customers and the services they require.”