SHENZHEN, China -- Today the Next Generation Optical Transport Network Forum (NGOF) officially launched its five-star criteria for premium private lines. The criteria redefines the key indicators for enterprise private lines in five dimensions: high availability, large bandwidth, low latency and jitter, service agility, and online self-management. The criteria also define five levels of premium private lines based on differentiated user experience. The criteria aims to provide guidance for upstream and downstream industry partners to jointly build premium private line networks, deliver a better service experience for enterprise customers, and drive the prosperity of the entire optical network industry.

According to IDC, 85% of enterprise applications will be deployed in the cloud by 2025. According to Gartner, the cloud computing market is expected to hit US$143.5 billion by 2020. The ever-growing demand for enterprise cloudification poses a great challenge to carriers' private line bearer networks. In recent years, the bandwidth growth of enterprise private lines lags far behind that of home broadband services. High-value customers such as financial institutions, government agencies, OTTs, and large enterprises, attach a great importance to high reliability, low latency, large bandwidth, bandwidth on demand (BOD), high cost effectiveness, and fast provisioning. Carriers urgently need to provide private lines of a better quality to address the future cloudification requirements of various enterprises.

In response to this market demand, the NGOF industry alliance has been focusing on the formulation of a unified criteria for premium private lines since its foundation, and has set up a cloud & private line bearer work group. NGOF has performed an in-depth survey on the service requirements of many enterprises such as financial institutions, Internet enterprises, and scientific research institutes. Based on the survey results, it has put forward the five-star criteria for premium private lines from the perspective of user experience, aiming to provide guidance for industry partners to innovate premium private lines. The criteria consist of five indicators: guaranteed bandwidth, high availability, low latency and jitter, service agility, and online self-management.

• Guaranteed bandwidth: Enterprise private lines need to provide guaranteed bandwidth based on end-to-end physical network isolation, and encrypt data based on different levels.

• High availability: Enterprise private lines need to deliver a link availability of 99% or higher. The link availability can vary from 99% to 99.99% based on different levels.

• Low latency and jitter: By using the E2E provisioning latency per 1000 km private line as well as the difference between the actual route latency and latency during provisioning as the evaluation metrics, NGOF quantifies the latency and jitter based on different levels.

• Service agility: NGOF quantifies the service provisioning time, which is from the time when an enterprise customer subscribes to a private line service online to the time when the carrier delivers the service to the customer. The service provisioning time can range from months to minutes, based on different levels.

• Online self-management allows enterprise customers to manage private line KPIs in a visualized manner, and customize differentiated private line service policies on demand.

Zhao Wenyu, leader of the cloud & private line bearer work group at NGOF, pointed out: "NGOF has worked with industry partners to thoroughly survey enterprise customers' requirements, and put forward five-star criteria for premium private lines based on user experience. We look to leverage a quantitative criteria system to drive industry partners to jointly build experience-measurable private line bearer networks, so as to provide superior service experience for end users and promote the prosperity of the optical network industry."

Liu Yi, chief engineer of the transmission & access network at China Telecom Chongqing, said: "Based on our criteria for premium private lines, China Telecom Chongqing has created the "FIRST" premium private line product portfolio and offered high-quality services tailored for various high-value customers, improving our differentiated competitiveness and user experience. That's why China Telecom Chongqing has made great progress in the high-end government/enterprise market."

Simon Lu, President of the Transport Network Domain at Huawei, said: "As an integral part of the global optical network industry, Huawei will continue to enhance our solution innovation to help carriers achieve business success. Today, Huawei's end-to-end MS-OTN, ASON 2.0, and Network Cloud Engine (NCE) are helping carriers create five-star premium private lines. Looking forward, we will further strengthen joint innovation with industry partners to enable the value growth of global carriers by harnessing premium private lines."

To date, premium private lines have been highly recognized by the three tier-1 carriers in China and leading carriers in Europe, which have embarked on the journey of exploring innovation practices. In the future, NGOF will further play a decisive role as an industry alliance, and continue to work with industry partners worldwide to propel the prosperity of the entire optical network industry.

NGOF