Cisco Delivers Network Convergence System, a Network Fabric Family

Several leading global service providers – including BSkyB (Sky), KDDI and Telstra – are deploying the Cisco NCS to create new revenue streams, simplify operations and deliver exciting personalized experiences to their customers.

The system's programmability and virtualization capabilities enable service providers to accelerate the transition to software defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV).

The NCS's industry-leading capabilities enable service providers to not only accommodate growing network traffic but also seize the opportunity created by trillions of programmable device-driven events generated by the Internet of Everything (IoE), the networked connection of people, data, processes and things.

The IoE requires networks to scale not only bandwidth, but also compute and control functions to manage policies and to program responses with precise results in the expected timeframe.

The NCS is designed to facilitate such IoE events, which can be ongoing "conversations" creating strings of interactivity between people, applications and devices, such as wearable health monitors linking with personal information and cloud-based health portals or 4G LTE-connected automobiles signaling that a driver is almost home, prompting the home network to adjust home temperature and lighting.

With trillions of new "connected events" predicted to occur over Internet networks in the next decade, service providers have significant monetization opportunities during this timeframe, particularly in certain vertical markets, such as healthcare ($174 billion), manufacturing ($284 billion), and smart homes ($850 billion) (source: Machina Research).

"Sky is the UK's favorite ‘triple-play' provider of TV, broadband and home telephony. At the same time, we're a leader in internet TV, operating the UK's largest on-demand service, as well as innovative over-the-top video services like Sky Go and NOW TV. As a result, we understand exactly how customers are embracing the internet to access video content, and it's why we built our broadband network with video delivery in mind. But to maintain our leadership, and continue to be the best network over which to access video, we need to ensure we can keep well ahead of demand. The work that we are doing with Cisco and the deployment of Cisco NCS will enable us to expand our capacity and intelligence in the network to be able to keep meeting the evolving needs of our customers," said Laurent Lavallee, Head of Network Strategy and Architecture, Sky.

Cisco Network Convergence System

The NCS family, with more than 100 patents, joins the industry-leading Cisco Carrier Routing System (CRS) and Aggregation Services Router (ASR) families and acts as a foundational network fabric to interconnect the architecture, delivering the following benefits:

• Scale: Industry's only system built for petabit scale, capable of supporting trillions of events across a connected fabric. The NCS is capable of transporting the entire Netflix library in less than one second.

• Agility: Industry's first carrier-grade, programmable convergence system designed for advanced virtualization capabilities. The NCS extends, connects, controls and responds to applications, networks and data centers by managing and moving network and compute resources wherever and whenever they are needed across the architecture, in real time.

• Efficiencies: When deployed as part of the Cisco ONE Service Provider Architecture, which embraces and extends SDN/NFV, the Cisco NCS family can help network operators reduce total cost of ownership by 45 percent while consuming 60 percent less power.