Network Transformation Awards - 2020

And the winners are...

9 companies from across the connectivity ecosystem have won awards at the 4^th Network Transformation Awards – with two prizes for ZTE Corporation and wins for SK TELECOM, Telenor Pakistan, Netcracker Technology, NTT Communications, the Rural Cloud Initiative (RCI), Fungible, Altiostar and Anuta Networks.

With the quality of the submitted projects high across the board, there was a fantastic standard of innovation, service enhancement and technical creativity on show from all the shortlisted entries. The awards were split across three categories – operator awards, products & solutions, and innovation – and a range of projects were recognised, from an SDN orchestrator that transforms telco cloud service to an open vRAN and a 5G-based solution for ULL autonomous vehicles.

Finally, there was a special category recognising outstanding individual contribution to the community – and the winner was Mattias Fridstrom, Chief Evangelist at Telia Carrier and a longstanding advocate for open network transformation.

The winning entries are:

Operator Award: 5G Service Excellence: SK TELECOM

SK Telecom launched a 5G service to accellerate innovation beyond mobile communications in April 2019. Based on an open ecosystem an micro services architecture, consisting of an operator-programmable SDN orchestrator that covers the entire transport network and a distributed and on-site MEC, with nationwide 5G edge cloud service in the pipeline.

Operator Award: Community Crisis Support: Telenor Pakistan

Since Telenor entered the Pakistan market 15 years ago, the company has ben able to capture 46 million customer nationwide - including providing GSM/LTE coverage in remote and challenging areas to populations severely underserved by even basic utilities.

Operator Awards: Embracing Open: NTT Communications

NTT Com’s edge computing platform is a newly built cloud-native platform, specifically designed for emerging applications such as AI, IoT and 5G. It also meets the new demands for pursuing low latency, reducing cost, and guaranteeing privacy. It is designed to accelerate local 5G deployment and to promote AIoT ecosystem.

Products and Solutions: Edge and Cloud Excellence: Netcracker Technology

Netcracker’s Edge Domain Orchestration brings together new edge orchestration functions for MEC apps and 5G network slicing, enhancements to network orchestration for Open vRAN vCU/vDU, enhancements to service orchestration to unify services and connectivity across all edge domains and OSS functions to enable full automation within the edge domain. The functions are cloud-native - enabling CSPs to deploy only the functions they need for their specific edge strategy.

Products and Solutions: Emerging Edge Product: ZTE Corporation

The ZTE Common Edge Full-Scenario MEC solution helps operators implement MEC one-site deployment, self-service provisioning, and simplified O&M, so that the MEC can be located anywhere.

Products and Solutions: Next-Gen Communications Product: Anuta Networks

Anuta Networks' Anuta ATOM is a modular, extensible, and cloud-native software platform that enables operators to rapidly design and provision network services, collect real-time telemetry, develop deep network analytics, ensure compliance and provide closed-loop automation for multi-vendor physical and virtual infrastructure.

Innovation: Use Case: Rural Cloud Initiative (RCI)

The RCI is a coalition of rural telecom operators and technology providers committed to promoting and accelerating the digital transformation of rural America. The solution brings together Private LTE Networks, 5G Networks, Edge Storage, Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC), Video Analytics, Industrial Automation & Drone Solutions as a complete solution stack.

Innovation: Upstart of the Year: Fungible

Fungible DPU is a new class of microprocessor powering next generation data center infrastructure. Optimized for data interchange and data-centric computations, the Fungible DPU is designed to improve the performance, economics, reliability, and security of data centers built on scale-out principles, and to do so at scales from a few racks to many thousands of racks, all within a single building.

Innovation: New Product Innovation: Altiostar

Altiostar pioneered the first commercial deployment of a fully virtualized Open RAN (Open vRAN) using O-RAN principles, which implements a container-based cloud-native micro-service architecture. This new architecture enables advanced cloud-based networks that support new applications and services to be deployed with advanced automation, newer algorithms, and improved QoE while ensuring network slicing and a CUPS architecture can be supported.

Innovation: New Service Innovation: ZTE Corporation

The industry’s first FMC-based ultra-low latency 5G remote driving completed by ZTE jointly with China Unicom Liaocheng subsidiary and Zhongtong Bus. Based on the 5G network, the remote control vehicles have been operating successfully in the industrial park of Zhongtong Bus. This solution deploys 5G UPF downward onto the built-in MEC card of the PON OLT in the campus access office closer to the end users. It integrates UPF and MEP to directly transmit the media stream to APP on the built-in MEC card. With 10G-PON wireline access, it reduces round-trip latency of vehicle control information transmission and video transmission by 92% from 30ms to 2ms, meeting the 5G remote driving latency requirement of less than 10ms.

Individual of the year: Mattias Fridstrom, Telia Carrier

The Network Transformation Awards 2020 took place as part of the opening day of the Layer123 World Congress: Service Evolution Beyond SDN and Network Virtualization.