The Challenge
Nextlink Internet is a fast-growing ISP serving nearly 100,000 customers across 11 states in the rural Heartland of America. Headquartered in Texas, it delivers high-speed fixed wireless and fiber-optic internet to residential, commercial, education, and public sector customers across the Midwest, Great Plains, and beyond.
Growing that footprint put the pressure one layer down. Nextlink needed transport and aggregation that scaled cost-effectively, stayed aligned with open standards, and worked with the automation tooling its engineers already ran, without giving up performance. Reaching underserved communities with affordable broadband only works if the cost of each new site keeps falling.
The Solution
Nextlink runs IP Infusion’s OcNOS SP and OcNOS DC in production on Edgecore open hardware. The software modernizes transport aggregation, core data center operations, and site router switching, and it carries advanced traffic engineering on open, multi-vendor infrastructure that suits Nextlink’s wider strategy of blending traditional and open architectures.
- OcNOS enables Segment Routing (SR), MPLS, and ISIS for transport and aggregation
- Edgecore open hardware platforms support 100G and 400G interfaces
- NETCONF/YANG integration ties OcNOS into Nextlink’s network automation tools
Outcomes
OcNOS and Edgecore are now part of Nextlink’s production environment supporting middle-mile and data center transport. Two things change in daily operations: capacity grows along an open-standards path instead of one vendor’s proprietary one, and the new transport layer answers to the NETCONF/YANG tooling the team already uses, so the build spreads across 11 states without a second operating model to staff.
Cameron Kilton, Chief Technology Officer at Nextlink Internet: “IP Infusion’s OcNOS software, paired with Edgecore hardware, is now part of our production environment supporting middle-mile and data center transport. In these targeted use cases, the platform’s flexibility, support for open standards, and cost structure align well with our goals to expand broadband access throughout the Heartland while maintaining operational agility and performance.”
Why OcNOS
OcNOS lets Nextlink choose hardware and software separately, optimize performance, and reduce total cost of ownership while keeping the door open to combine traditional and open architectures across rural service areas. The result is a transport and data center foundation built to scale alongside Nextlink’s commitment to closing the digital divide.