India’s Tech Mahindra, a US$5.1 billion IT services and consulting company, has teamed up with Cisco to modernise optical transport networks, using the latter’s routed optical networking solutions.
With India on track to introduce 5G mobile services by next year, the company is positioning itself to be able to supply advanced optical transport networks that enable 5G to achieve an almost 10-fold increase in speed over current 4G networks.
The Tech Mahindra-Cisco collaboration aims to simplify the internet transport networks by leveraging optical and routing technologies to converge services over an IP infrastructure, thus enabling a high degree of automation, Tech Mahindra’s head of global business - 5G and network services, Manish Mangal said.
He added that the collaboration will empower service providers to reduce their operational expenses and total cost of ownership (TCO).
As part of the collaboration, Tech Mahindra is investing in both a routed optical networking lab at Bengaluru, India and specialised services such as SDN-enabled transport, transport slice and segment routing.
Mangal said that idea was to enable customers to experience and operationalise the transformation of the 5G transport infrastructure.
“This collaboration will enable service providers to merge IP and private-line services onto a single transport layer with standardised pluggable coherent optics,” he said.
Past collaboration
Mangal told iTnews Asia that Tech Mahindra and Cisco “have a strong history of collaboration in delivering transformational programs for communications service providers (CSPs) and enterprises”.
For example, the two companies are jointly delivering a 5G IP transport modernisation program for a UK Tier-1 service provider.
“This program has key elements of segment routing and software-defined network (SDN) stack from Cisco,” Mangal added.
He said Tech Mahindra, plans to “further scale 5G deployments and enable the new emerging metaverse universe”.
For this, the company is looking to leapfrog, with its collaboration with Cisco, towards a routed optical network (RON) along with high-density routers, high-capacity digital coherent optics (ZR or ZR+), simplified dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) line systems, optical network controllers and Sedona NetFusion.
