Mountain View, Calif. — December 9, 2014— ConteXtream (http://www.contextream.com/), a leading provider of carrier-grade network virtualization solutions, today announced the launch of ContexNet 4.0, the first commercially-available OpenDaylight-based, carrier-grade software-defined networking (SDN) fabric for network functions virtualization (NFV). ContexNet 4.0 helps carriers avoid commoditization of their products and develop new revenue streams by creating a more flexible and programmable network through a SDN/NFV model.
According to Ovum’s recent World Cellular Data Metrics report (http://bit.ly/1uJLRGJ), LTE subscriptions are expected to rise to more than 2 billion by 2019, increasing from 250 million today. Along with this growth in subscribers, carriers are experiencing significant growth in voice and data usage placing added pressure on the network. However, while network usage continues to grow, carriers are also seeing a significant drop in data pricing with an estimated decrease of 77 percent during the first nine months of 2014, according to Chetan Sharma’s Q3 2014 report (http://bit.ly/1HfUgrn). As a result, carriers are finding it harder to reinvest in the network – putting them at risk of becoming commoditized as voice and data only providers, while over-the-top providers like Facebook, Twitter and others are seeing significant increased revenue from mobile.
To combat this trend, carriers are looking to SDN and NFV to virtualize their networks so they can decrease costs and be more nimble to capitalize on current market trends. ContexNet 4.0 helps carriers overcome deployment challenges and enables them to pursue new revenue opportunities by leveraging an industry-standard approach that easily integrates into existing infrastructure and provides the flexibility needed to quickly introduce and support new services. This paves the way for service providers to offer more personalized, a la carte-style plans to consumers, such as video or music streaming, without straining the network as a whole.
Taking advantage of OpenDaylight, OpenStack, OpenFlow and other industry standards, ContexNet 4.0 provides unsurpassed scale, supporting millions of subscribers with customized service profiles, as well as the resiliency, high-availability and extendibility requirements for carriers’ unique network needs. This complies with the Internet Engineering Tasks Force (IETF) horizontal standard interfaces for network virtualization allowing operators to create programmable networks that are not only flexible and self-healing, but also have a high degree of consistency. The solution also allows for geographically dispersed sites to be unified and operate as a single network.
Supporting Quotes:
- “Today’s wireless carriers are facing a tipping point. They need to innovate beyond their traditional service model or become the latest commodity industry,” saidNachman Shelef, chief executive officer and co-founder, ConteXtream. “The cost of increased traffic without corresponding growth in ARPU has tightened profit margins for carriers, making it harder to continue building up the network to meet future needs and investing in R&D to identify and launch new services. ContexNet 4.0 allows service providers to optimize their network to meet traffic demands, control costs and introduce new services so they can open up new revenue streams.”
- “ConteXtream has been a valuable member and an active contributor of the OpenDaylight community,” said Neela Jacques, executive director, OpenDaylight. “They were also among the first companies to embed OpenDaylight code into a commercially shipped product. It will be exciting to watch how OpenDaylight continues to impact their solutions.”
- “To meet customer needs, it is important for us to be able to add new services to our portfolio at record speed and provide these customers with high quality services,” said Pål Grønsund, PhD, research scientist, Telenor Research. “We have been working with ConteXtream for a while and it clearly has the potential to contribute to these values. We also did an ETSI POC on Gi-LAN virtualization and now we are working on our next ETSI POC on SDN-enabled EPC with them, which also uses ConteXtream’s OpenDaylight-based Carrier-SDN fabric. We are excited to be partnering with ConteXtream on the new network paradigm of network virtualization.”
- “Our customers want us to provide an end-to-end, high performance solution that exceeds their performance, scalability and reliability requirements,” said Werner Schaefer, vice president, Network Functions Virtualization, HP. “HP is committed to delivering an open platform for NFV, complemented by joint solutions with partners like ConteXtream, enabling us to offer the networking solutions service providers need to reduce capital and operating expenditures, while also introducing revenue-generating services.
- “ConteXtream has been a leading pioneer in delivering cloud-based network virtualization for service providers and has been battle-tested with major carriers since it introduced its first subscriber aware solution in 2010,“ said Sue Rudd, director service provider analysis, Strategy Analytics. “The new iteration announced today complies with OpenDaylight – http://www.opendaylight.org/ – and other open industry specifications to address real world multi-vendor, multi-cloud challenges that are not yet being met by non-proprietary vendors in the space.”
- “ConteXtream’s strategy is well-aligned with carrier’s interest in open source SDN solutions,” said David Krozier, principal analyst, network infrastructure, Ovum. “The company’s new OpenDaylight-based, ContexNet 4.0 product builds on ConteXtream’s significant experience in delivering carrier-grade SDN solutions.”
- As an early participant in the carrier-SDN sector, ConteXtream’s contributions to OpenDaylight are particularly informed and valuable,” said Daniel Keoppel, executive director, Verizon Ventures. “We support innovations in open standards through our investments in ConteXtream and other Verizon Venture portfolio companies.”
To learn more about ContexNet 4.0 visit: http://www.contextream.com/contexnet/
About ConteXtream
ConteXtream is a privately held software-defined-networking (SDN) company that enables carriers to deliver network capacity and functions in the same way cloud providers deliver applications effectively utilizing standard compute and storage. ConteXtream’s SDN offering, based on standards is carrier-grade and enables Network Function Virtualization (NFV) for various solutions deployed on carrier networks. Deployed by Tier-1 operators, ConteXtream’s Carrier-SDN dynamically and elastically connects subscribers to services and enables carriers to leverage standard, low-cost server hardware and hypervisors to virtualize functions and services, while replacing costly purpose-built proprietary systems. Headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., ConteXtream is backed by Benhamou Global Ventures, Gemini Israel Funds, Norwest Venture Partners and Sofinnova Ventures as well as Comcast Ventures and Verizon Ventures. For additional information, visit www.contextream.com.
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