Thereby advancing MEF 3.0 vision of supporting capabilities for fulfillment, control, performance, and assurance across multi-operator networks

MEFnet partners will demonstrate this project at the upcoming MEF17 in Orlando

Petach Tikva, Israel; Hong Kong; Rome, Italy; London, U.K. – Nov. 14, 2017 – ECI, PCCW Global, Sparkle and Tata Communications announced today that the MEF 3.0 Service Fulfillment and Activation Project led by them will demonstrate a major advancement of the MEF’s Third Network vision of agile, assured and orchestrated network connectivity services, at MEF17 in Orlando, Florida this week.

In the age of ubiquitous internet, seamless roaming, and decades after the advent of international direct dialing, it is somewhat surprising that it still takes weeks or months to set up widely used services across multiple service provider domains. MEF 3.0 and the LSO framework were established with the express purpose of facilitating simple, assured activation of services across multiple service provider domains and establishing industry standards which will solve this issue going forward. Adopting LSO principles will enable service providers to focus on quickly generating revenues rather than network operations and may give them a competitive edge.

“The MEFnet project team, led by ECI, PCCW Global, Sparkle and Tata Communications, is once again showing that the industry can already benefit from the LSO framework today. It is important the industry be able to realize the benefits in parallel to the standardization process which is currently in the works,” said Pascal Menezes, MEF CTO. “We live and work in a global economy, and advanced communications services and their underlying networks can only meet their full potential if they can be used on a global scale and span multiple service providers. This is the goal of the MEF 3.0 services framework, and MEF 3.0 Service Fulfillment and Activation Project is helping us to realize that dream.”

After the development of an LSO innovation platform, and an award-winning proof of concept at MEF16, the MEF 3.0 Service Fulfillment and Activation Project now takes the MEF vision and implementation one step further. The ECI, PCCW Global, Sparkle and Tata Communications project team, has shown that MEF 3.0 can successfully speed up service turn up and assurance across multiple service provider domains, even across domains which still rely on proprietary OSS. This is done by providing a transparent overlay which interfaces with OSS/BSS on the one side and LSO interfaces on the other – thereby permitting the utilization of LSO protocols to fulfill and assure the requested services. The team’s work is being turned into a permanent MEF sandbox project. Open to all MEF members, it features live APIs, permitting the creation and testing of multi-domain services. Most importantly, participants can use this sandbox to test the viability of the LSO solutions today. By adopting the suggested inter-carrier overlay approach, service providers can benefit immediately from global service automation, while pursuing gradual and systematic upgrades of the proprietary systems to become fully LSO-compliant.

“We’ve come a long way from when we first introduced our proof-of-concept last year during MEF16, where attendees witnessed the implementation of Third Network services firsthand,” said Sarit Tager, VP R&D SDN and LSO at ECI. “Now that the proof of concept has become a reality, we’re pleased to bring this solution to MEF, showing a true global vision for vendor agnostic SDN and NFV services is achievable, and that global connectivity can be setup dynamically to access cloud-based services or other applications, and align with end-user expectations for on-demand agility.”

The work done by MEFnet project will be demonstrated at MEF17 in Orlando, FL, USA during the week of Nov. 13th .