Cisco today announced the deployment of its new converged SDN transport infrastructure for 5G and plans to deploy a 100 Gb/s IP and optical network for India’s Bharti Airtel.

The company is working with Bharti Airtel to prepare for 5G deployment with an “IP over Ethernet over fiber” network that it describes as the “largest hyper-complex brownfield network transformation of its kind in India.” 

The new framework will eliminate manual touchpoints and lead to the “collapse” of multiple legacy domains and facilitate an automated network architecture with segment routing, according to Cisco. 

The operator claims that by activating India’s “first automated Ethernet over fiber network,” it will enable a more agile, programmable, and software-defined platform. The end result of that effort includes service expansion in rural communities, increased network bandwidth and availability, and lower costs.

Cisco’s converged SDN transport infrastructure has been deployed on PLDT’s network in the Philippines to aid in the development of 5G services, the companies announced today. Positioning the effort as a network transformation, the infrastructure includes Cisco’s segment routing technology in addition to its IP and optical services.

PLDT’s network can support fixed and mobile services for enterprises and consumers, and IoT connectivity, according to Cisco. The end-to-end IP and optical network is also enabled with segment routing and integration between the transport layer and data centers.

The central SDN controller provides PLDT with the ability to automate operations, remove redundant layers or legacy technologies, and reduce costs with a more simplified network architecture, according to Cisco. The vendor and PLDT began working together on network transport in April 2019.

A fresh research report from Dell’Oro Group places Cisco in fifth place in the global telecom equipment market with 7% of total revenue in 2019. Huawei continued to lead the pack with a 28% share of the market, followed by Nokia at 16%, Ericsson with 14%, and ZTE at 10%. The firm also calculated that Cisco lost 1% of market share from 2018. 

During the last month Cisco also introduced machine learning capabilities and tighter integration between service providers and vendors in its IoT management platform. At that time, Cisco said it had about 70,000 enterprise IoT customers spanning more than 160 million connected devices.