Orange Takes Leading Role in 5G with Help of LFN

As a  leading global telecommunications company, Orange understands the importance of 5G in today’s networks. The company announced 5G trials in France for 2018 and aims to deliver an operational 5G network by 2020. This is no small feat when looking at Orange’s 273M customers worldwide, including 152,000 employees. Orange also has wireless deployments in 13 countries, 46 million 4G customers worldwide, over 4.7M fibre customers and 450,000 km of undersea cable. One of the largest telecoms operators in Europe, the bulk of Orange’s operations expand through Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

In order to efficiently accomplish its aggressive 5G goals by 2020, Orange has opted to leverage new SDN and NFV technologies to improve agility and reduce costs through the use of open source, a program they call  “On-Demand Networks”. As open source is a key element of its solution, Orange joined LFN at the Platinum level and is leveraging three key projects to drive its On-Demand Network transformation efforts — ONAP, OPNFV and ODL.

“At Orange, we are using open source to speed up the industrialisation (hardening) of technology and ensuring open APIs — to help us partner and create new opportunities to deliver a better customer experience. LFN projects help solve some of the challenges that come with SDN/NFV by reducing the time and effort required for network transformation, specifically in the areas of simplified and automated operations, NFV Infrastructure/VNF validation and onboarding, network service design/onboarding and interoperability.” – Jehanne Savi, Executive Leader of the All-IP and On-demand Networks Programmes.

Read more about Orange’s participation in LFN and use of open source here.