German telecommunication carrier Witcom is using technology from five suppliers – 6Wind, Adva, Advantech, Dacosa and Dell – to power its smart city initiative.
 
The project uses Adva’s Ensemble connector, 6Wind’s Turbo IPsec vRouter, Advantech’s uCPE universal customer premises equipment, Dacosa’s installation and managed services, and Dell’s uCPE appliances.
 
The platform supports the rapid and efficient rollout of IoT, video and services across Witcom’s IPv6 network and enables scalability for global deployments.
 
“We took an innovative approach for an open multi-vendor solution to power our smart city initiative working with 6Wind, Adva, Advantech, Dell and Dacoso,” said Volker Bodenbach, head of technology and operations at Witcom. “Together we designed a secure open platform that powers edge cloud for IoT, video and next-generation services across our IPv6 network that can further be deployed worldwide across many verticals.”
 
The multi-vendor platform is composed of technologies optimised for edge cloud architecture. The uCPE approach brings increased efficiency and scale to the ICT service provider’s business. It also ensures that its customers benefit from choice and flexibility. Now, Witcom can streamline multiple virtual network functions (VNFs) on a single installation deployed close to the end customer, helping cities digitalise their infrastructure and take advantage of the latest innovation in areas such as traffic control, surveillance and IoT.
 
“6Wind’s vRouters provide the high-performance virtual routing foundation required for secure, scalable uCPE,” said Eric Carmès, founder and CEO of 6Wind. “We are proud to work with Witcom alongside our partners Adva, Advantech, Dacoso and Dell to create an industry-leading smart city initiative for IoT, video and additional services.”
 
6Wind provides server software for networking deployed globally at tier-one OEMs, service providers and enterprises. 6Wind is based near Paris, France, with regional offices in China and the USA.
 
Adva’s Ensemble connector software also powers operational features such as zero-touch provisioning and dynamic addition of new virtual network functions.
 
“Our Ensemble connector is ideal for hosting and managing demanding uCPE applications,” said James Buchanan, general manager of Adva. “It’s now giving Witcom the power of the cloud along with several other benefits, such as zero-touch provisioning and platform security. It also provides access to the Ensemble Harmony ecosystem, which includes a wide variety of onboarded commercial VNFs. With its new uCPE network, Witcom can respond in an instant to customer demands and empower municipal networks to test out offerings and ideas. It will help accelerate the fourth industrial revolution and be a key tool in transforming cities into safer, less wasteful and more pleasant places to live.”
 
Dacoso, an IT service provider in continental Europe, assembled the installation using suppliers to power this deployment. Working together, the suppliers teamed up to meet Witcom’s requirements for performance, cost, ease of deployment and security.
 
“Our task was to combine the components for this managed edge cloud into a finely tuned overall solution,” said Karsten Geise, head of business and development at Dacoso. “IoT via IPv6 public networks will be of great interest to many companies in the future if it meets such high security and automation requirements.”
 
The deployment is on a central hub site as well as remote spoke sites. The spoke sites are in outdoor cabinets using the FWA-1012VC white box uCPE from Advantech. This appliance integrates the Intel Atom C3758 eight-core processor, two 1GbE SFPs and six 1GbE RJ45 interfaces, providing compute headroom and connectivity to meet edge site requirements.
 
“Witcom’s smart city blueprint extends the cloud infrastructure to the IoT edge, building a solid and open foundation to run innovative mobility and security services,” said James Yang, vice president at Taiwanese company Advantech. “Our white box uCPE helps service providers like Witcom enable this intelligent edge with optimised platforms that provide ample computing power and rich connectivity while meeting edge environmental and mechanical constraints.”
 
The initial deployment includes IoT infrastructure for the transportation and mobility industry. Dacoso intends to use this a template for deployments across Germany, Austria and Switzerland.