South Slope, a rural independent telecommunications cooperative, has deployed the Cisco NCS5500 series platform to meet growing capacity demands, using its existing network to deliver voice, data, and video services along with a variety of business ethernet and cellular backhaul services to its customers throughout eastern Iowa.
Previously, South Slope placed significant investment in a legacy converged packet optical network that was no longer meeting capacity demands. A transition from the existing 10G solution to 100G transport was necessary, and the company needed a way to cost effectively retain as much of the existing network as possible.
To facilitate the transition, increase the power of the underlying transport network, and reduce operational complexity, Cisco and South Slope created a converged solution based on the Cisco NCS5500 router series. With this new solution, South Slope was able to utilize integrated multiplexing optics in the routing platform to exceed 200G wavelengths over the existing packet core.
To simplify, increase capability and differentiate their business services, South Slope has also deployed Cisco Segment Routing with Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) and Ethernet VPN (EVPN). Adding EVPN for services delivery converges all services into a single control plane and allows for additional redundancy capabilities, which were unavailable in the existing network.
“Making the shift to Cisco’s NCS5500 series, we are now able to deterministically increase transport bandwidth without additions to our optical network,” said Brian Hamacher, director of operations, South Slope. “With the help of Cisco we are able to keep our commitment to continue to deliver cutting-edge telecommunications services and the fastest internet speeds possible to our customers.”
“We are proud to help South Slope efficiently scale to provide the best service possible to their customers,” said Sumeet Arora, senior vice president and general manager, Service Provider Network Systems, Cisco. “They have invested the right resources and deployed the technology necessary to keep the rural areas of Iowa connected which aligns well with our goal to be the bridge to possible.”