The Challenge
Uniti operates 8 million strand miles of fiber and answers to public shareholders, so every equipment decision has to deliver performance and shareholder value at the same time. Legacy vendor supply chain issues and rising costs no longer fit the company’s growth plans, which prompted a review of the aggregation strategy underneath the next stage of growth.
“As a publicly traded company, timely upgrades and equipment acquisitions must be designed not only for performance but to provide shareholder value to the company. Legacy vendor supply chain issues and rising costs did not align with our growth,” said Graham Wooden, Uniti’s IP Services Engineering Director.
The Solution
Uniti chose OcNOS SP, IP Infusion’s open Network Operating System, for its aggregation deployments. Buying hardware and network software separately gave Uniti the freedom to source equipment more flexibly and standardize on a carrier-grade NOS purpose-built for service provider use cases.
- OcNOS SP running on Uniti’s choice of open hardware for aggregation
- Open networking architecture to reduce supply chain exposure
- A platform designed for service provider scale and operations
Outcomes
Open networking moved Uniti’s aggregation footprint in three directions at once: cost, supply risk, and energy.
- CAPEX and OPEX both came down, so aggregation upgrades compete better for capital inside a public company.
- Dependency on legacy vendor supply chains eased, retiring a constraint that had worked against the growth plan.
- Power needs across the aggregation footprint fell 80%, and that cut lifted Uniti’s score for environment, social, and corporate governance (ESG), the reporting its shareholders read.
Why OcNOS
Uniti is part of the growing customer base that selected OcNOS during a period when IP Infusion saw strong demand in Provider Edge and Aggregation Router use cases. OcNOS SP gave Uniti a route to modernize aggregation economics while preserving the performance its publicly traded business required.