Customer Success Story
Airtel Africa improves subscriber experiences with network automation
Airtel offers mobile voice, data, and payment services to millions of people across the vast continent of Africa. The mobile network operator (MNO) is committed to delivering world-class experiences and helping currently underserved, unbanked, and unconnected communities benefit from the digital world. A highly automated Juniper network is helping Airtel efficiently achieve its network service goals.
Overview
| Company | Airtel Africa |
| Industry | Service Provider |
| Products used | Juniper Apstra, Anuta ATOM, PTX Series, MX Series, QFX Series |
| Region | EMEA |
14 countries served
Chad, Republic of the Congo, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Seychelles, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia
128 million
Customers in 2022, with strong growth in mobile data and mobile payment services
Improve service quality
Automated troubleshooting accelerates response times and network fixes
Fuel growth
Expand mobile services across Africa
Expand access to affordable mobile services
From the pristine beaches in the Seychelles to the equatorial jungles of Gabon, Airtel operates in unique landscapes, each presenting its own challenges of geography and infrastructure. Each country operates as its own entity, with multivendor networks and varying levels of technical skill.
Airtel wanted to upgrade its transport network to 400G to deliver performance at scale and build a new mobile core to support growth of its mobile voice, data, and payment services. In doing so, it took the opportunity to redesign its network for greater service agility, enhanced performance, and operational efficiency across its regions.
Automation assures network service quality
With Juniper, Airtel can count on a network that is ultra-reliable, scalable, secure. Network automation speeds service delivery and allows for rapid troubleshooting when issues arise, despite the vast geography and without expert engineering resources locally.
It relies on the Juniper PTX Series Packet Transport Routers for its core network and the Juniper MX Series Universal Routing Platform to deliver advanced services to consumers and businesses.
Juniper Apstra intent-based networking software enables reliable, automated operations for its mobile core. With Apstra, Airtel infrastructure teams can accelerate operations with a single source of truth, powerful analytics, and root-cause identification, quickly pinpointing and resolving issues when they arise.
Airtel is in the process of deploying the Anuta ATOM workflow management platform to automate and simplify service provisioning and network configuration with the intent to implement closed loop automation/orchestration in the near future.
The MNO worked closely with Juniper Professional Services to operationalize network automation so the provider could derive value from the new network more quickly.
Simplification and automation fuel business growth
Airtel is the first service provider in Africa to deploy Juniper 400G routing and an early adopter of Apstra, game-changing decisions that accelerated network modernization to meet the growing business and consumer demand for mobile services.
The new network enables Airtel to expand availability of 4G services, lay the foundation for 5G, and bring business services like SD-WAN and direct cloud connectivity to market.
Network automation allows Airtel to manage its network in a scalable and efficient way, dramatically reducing the potential for human errors, and ensuring consistent service quality across countries.
The Products
Juniper Apstra
Intent-based networking software automates the entire network life cycle—from design through everyday operations—across multivendor data centers with continuous validation, powerful analytics, and root cause identification to assure reliability.
Anuta ATOM
Cloud-native, modular workflow automation platform delivers network provisioning, compliance management, service orchestration, and closed-loop automation.
Forming the foundation of core routing architectures, PTX Packet Transport Routers provide ultrahigh power efficiency, scale, and performance for 100G, 400G, and 800G architectures. Designed for the unexpected and optimized for WAN core and data center use cases, the PTX Series routers offer forward-looking architectures built to endure.
With a robust portfolio of SDN-enabled routers, the MX Series provides industry-leading system capacity, density, security, and performance with unparalleled longevity.
QFX network switches deliver industry-leading throughput and scalability, a comprehensive routing stack, the open programmability of Junos OS, and the broadest set of EVPN-VXLAN and IP fabric capabilities. Juniper offers a wide range of switches for data center spine and leaf switches, campus distribution and core, or data center gateway and interconnect.
Juniper global services helps your organization align AI with people, process, and technology to accelerate the time to value for your modern infrastructure.
Published September 2022