As a late entrant to the highly competitive 5G market, DISH Wireless needed to offer compelling, highly differentiated experiences – rapidly and at scale. Its vision focused on the principles of openness, security and flexibility – and to meet dynamic market needs for today and tomorrow, DISH chose a cloud-native foundation for its 5G buildout.
DISH also decided to partner with Blue Planet, a division of Ciena, for intelligent automation that brings real-time value to DISH’s network and entire 5G ecosystem.
The video and executive summary below provide a summary of the competitive challenges that DISH Wireless faced, describe DISH’s strategy for winning in the marketplace, explain why DISH chose to partner with Blue Planet, and provide real-world examples of how DISH Wireless is leveraging Blue Planet’s intelligent automation capabilities to deploy dynamic solutions in its cloud-native 5G environment.
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Key Takeaways
DISH Wireless’s cloud-native 5G network offers high-performance, reliability and scale.
DISH Wireless–a wholly owned subsidiary of Dish Network–is one of the largest wireless carriers in the United States, with a well-earned reputation for driving purposeful innovation. However, by the time the company began its journey to becoming a 5G provider, DISH was a latecomer to the North American mobile market. As a result, the company knew it needed to deliver a markedly different customer experience from what the existing players already offered.
Unfortunately, traditional telecom OSS and IT environments are composed of layers of legacy systems with newer technology added on top and rely on manual intervention in service design, delivery, and assurance processes. As a result, services activation is a slow, expensive process. But in today’s instant communications world, 5G providers need to deliver services in with speed and agility.
As part of its differentiated strategy, DISH established three core principles for its 5G vision:
- Open. Dish’s vision is an open, standards-based environment throughout its entire ecosystem to ensure consistency in the IT infrastructure buildout and to ease the rollout process of new vendor software across the entire network.
- Secure. Security is built into every aspect of the network and IT infrastructure. DISH requires every software vendor and partner to adhere to DISH’s rigorous security-first practices.
- Flexible. To bring new services to market rapily, DISH emphasized flexibility through an open and programmable infrastructure.
Three core principles form the foundation of DISH Wireless’s 5G strategy
In addition, to obtain its spectrum license, DISH Wireless committed to coverage milestones that required the rapid rollout of sites across the U.S.
To meet the many dynamic demands of its 5G business, DISH decided on a cloud-native approach to its network buildout and worked with an ecosystem of partners, including Blue Planet, that adhered to its open, secure, and flexible core principles.
Blue Planet’s intelligent automation brings real-time value to DISH Wireless.
Blue Planet, a division of Ciena, provides a vendor-agnostic converged cloud-native automation platform for network operators, which addresses inventory and federation, orchestration, and assurance.
DISH Wireless leveraged Blue Planet’s intelligent automation capabilities to deploy two dynamic solutions into DISH’s cloud-native 5G environment:
- Dynamic inventory. DISH needed an accurate, single source of data across transport, packet core, and RAN that could be used to facilitate automation. As DISH’s virtualized and cloud-native environments change based on scale and size, the single source of truth offers a view of what is really in the network versus the planned state.
- Dynamic service order management. This publishes an accurate, real-time service catalog to the BSS, allowing customers to dynamically place orders, and translates these orders into automated workflows for orchestration.
At the height of their network deployment, DISH relied on Blue Planet’s dynamic inventory to drive over 200 cell site activations, helping it meet its FCC commitments. The real-time accuracy of Blue Planet’s discovery information has significantly minimized truck rolls, reducing site activation costs by 90%.
Blue Planet’s cloud-native intelligent automation in the DISH environment
In the next stage of DISH’s journey, the real-time accuracy of Blue Planet’s inventory solution will allow DISH to leverage the network with advanced analytics and value-added services for more effective monetization.
“[DISH is] a forward-leaning customer that was willing to experiment—[and] willing to fail fast. . . As a vendor, we've also shared in being able to progress our own roadmaps and plans at an order of magnitude faster than we typically would.”
- Kailem Anderson, Blue Planet, a division of Ciena