Service Provider

Sustainable convergence with a single flexible architecture

Offering mobile, internet, and TV as well as comprehensive IT and digital services to private and business customers, Swisscom is the leading ICT company in Switzerland. Swisscom also owns Fastweb + Vodafone Italy, the second largest telco in Italy. In 2023, World Finance magazine named Swisscom the world’s most sustainable telecommunications company, which is a key point of pride for the company.

To prepare for the major technology and market shifts being ignited globally by the adoption of AI and to deliver compelling new digital experience to its customers, Swisscom recognized that it needed to make fundamental changes to its network architecture and operational capabilities.

Swisscom’s network infrastructure, which included five Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) networks for Mobile, Wireline, B2B and Data-Center Interconnection, had become too fragmented and complex to manage. Operations costs were rising sharply, network reliability was being compromised, and customers were beginning to feel the impact. A lack of agility was another key challenge that needed to be addressed to ensure that service offerings could be continuously adapted and enhanced to give customers the best possible experience.

Swisscom embarked on its network convergence journey to overcome these challenges, envisioning a streamlined and unified network design that integrates all services into a single flexible architecture that provides greater scalability, reliability, and simplicity.

"The key principles guiding our decision-making," says Markus Reber, Executive Vice President of Networks at Swisscom, "included reducing costs, enhancing our sustainability efforts, streamlining operations, and minimizing redundancies in our network infrastructure."

To transform this vision into reality, Swisscom partnered with Cisco, using segment routing (SRv6) and automation to simplify operations, maximize network availability and reliability, and prepare the network for a future that will be increasingly dominated by automation and AI.

From the outset, the company set goals to achieve significant cost savings through its convergence efforts, targeting reductions in OPEX and in power consumption, with the goal of promoting a more sustainable digital economy for Switzerland.

Accelerating the AI revolution with Agile Services Networking

Swisscom chose Cisco Agile Services Networking as the foundational architecture for its convergence strategy. This architecture offers a new way of networking that is monetizable, economical, and built for delivering superior experiences. It’s also highly flexible, enabling Swisscom to evolve its rigid legacy architectures to a single unified segment routing domain that is optimized for handling new resource-intensive AI workloads.

"This new flexibility," Reber says, "makes it possible for us to distribute edge functionality, converge network and service layers, and connect AI data centers to each other and to endpoints, ultimately simplifying our operations through AI."

During the migration to converged networking, achieving a balance between the company’s legacy systems and new solutions involved a phased approach that required a careful assessment of which legacy components could be integrated or upgraded to align with the new simplified network architecture.

By collaborating closely with Cisco during this process, Swisscom ensured that new technologies like segment routing were introduced seamlessly. This was crucial for maintaining service continuity for customers, while at the same time progressively transitioning to a more efficient, scalable network.

To date, Swisscom has realized a variety of important benefits as a result of its network transformation. Cisco 8000 Series Routers and the IOS XR network operating system support a unified architecture that is providing increased scalability and performance, and the company has been able to dramatically simplify its network, going from 5 MPLS networks down to a single end-to-end SRv6 network.

Swisscom is now prepared to handle the surge in network traffic from the widespread use of AI chatbots and other AI-powered applications, while also reducing operating costs. What's more, the platform's advanced telemetry and automation capabilities are enhancing network visibility and responsiveness. This is paving the way for Swisscom to deliver reliable, high-quality services more efficiently and sustainably.

Swisscom is implementing a fully automated network that simplifies operations by integrating a CI/CD pipeline and test automation. This development not only streamlines network management but also accelerates the deployment of services, enabling Swisscom to swiftly adapt to changing market demands.

Through the SWISS-NEXT initiative, Swisscom is leveraging AI-driven insights and a robust data intelligence framework. With that, Swisscom's network is evolving towards greater autonomy, ensuring resilience and optimal performance across its expansive infrastructure. The implementation of AIOps and closed loop operations will enable Swisscom to achieve comprehensive network visibility and autonomy.

"Cisco’s vision of networking in the AI era is integral to enhancing connectivity, providing us with innovative solutions that ensure seamless, reliable, and future-ready network services for our customers," says Reber.

Sustainability is another area where Swisscom has benefited from its convergence transformation to build on its impressive track record of achievements in this area. To date, moving to power-efficient routing systems with Cisco Agile Services Networking has yielded a power reduction of about 50% for the Swisscom IP transport network.

The company is also seeing major improvements in network uptime with the converged network, going more than 400 days without a single major escalated outage, something that has never happened before.

Looking ahead, Swisscom continues to move forward with confidence on the next steps in its convergence journey, looking to further reduce the number of nodes in the network and find innovative ways to improve efficiency. These improvements will be driven not only by the company’s collaborative partnership with Cisco on network transformation, but also through efforts to optimize processes by leveraging AI, which will drive stability and resilience even higher.

"Our partnership with Cisco plays a critical role by providing us with innovative convergence solutions, but also by helping us meet future demands," says Reber.