Comsol Networks, a leading provider of enterprise-grade licensed wireless infrastructure, is pleased to announce it has completed its trial of the Telecom Infra Project-incubated (TIP) Disaggregated Cell Site Gateway (DCSG) solution in its lab in South Africa.

The trial evaluated how open and disaggregation technology can function in Comsol’s existing network infrastructure and is the first step in a broader strategy to explore new and innovative solutions for their network architectures. The trial was conducted using Network Operating System (NOS) provided by IP Infusion, Edgecore hardware and integration services by Infin8Africa.

“At Comsol, we believe innovation is important to provide the best services to our customers, and open and disaggregated technology like the TIP DCSG is a new and innovative solution in the way networks are designed and deployed,” says Mauritz Lewies, CTO, Comsol Networks.

“This successful trial of our DCSG solution is another proof point that our OcNOS network operating system accelerates disaggregated networking for service providers and delivers TIP-compliant and advanced services at a lower total cost of ownership,” says Atsushi Ogata, President and CEO, IP Infusion.

According to TIP, the DCSG is a shift from the traditional way networks are deployed and being widely adopted to change the future of networks for service providers to meet their innovation and service’s needs.

Following these successful lab trials, Comsol will now proceed with a field trial using TIP DCSG. "Comsol views the Disaggregation Infrastructure as a vital part of our 5G-FWA strategy and deployment moving forward. This will contribute towards Comsol providing a truly value-for-money service to the market that is underpinned by a much-needed quality which in turn enhances the end-user experience of the 5G arena in South Africa.

The DCSG was developed within TIP’s Open Optical & Packet Transport (OOPT) Project Group, by a sub-group led by Vodafone and Facebook. The TIP DCSG uses open, standard-based, disaggregated network technologies to target several opportunities in operators’ IP aggregation networks. This includes overall deployment cost reductions and the creation of a more diverse supply chain as well as operational efficiencies from being able to use software-defined networking (SDN) technologies for network management automation. The results of this trial will be contributed to TIP’s OOPT Project Group.

“At Infin8Africa, we have been engaging the industry regarding the Disaggregated Infrastructure deployment architectures for several years. We have successfully deployed a number of solutions and have worked with our customers, who have realised significant benefits, not only in terms of cost, but as it relates to owning, managing and operating the demands of Web scale environments. The DCSG solution we have been working on with COMSOL has once again proven that the technology is mature and ready for deployment at scale,” says Nigel van Tura, Infin8Africa CEO.

“The disaggregated solution offered by IPI and Edge-Core is a very cost-effective and feature-rich solution for the CSG function to circumvent vendor lock-in and strengthen the disaggregated model put forward by TIP. All the required features: FRR, VPWS, VPLS, EVPN (MPLS forwarding) and L3VPNs function as expected on the platform; additionally FRR was achieved in under 50ms which is exceptional. It will offer operators a valid carrier-grade alternative to the traditional vendor options,” says Hanroux du Plooy, Infin8Africa CTO.