Charter’s Spectrum Enterprise may have followed Comcast as two of the first cable MSOs to enter the burgeoning SD-WAN market, but the service provider wants to focus its attention on offering different options that allow customers to migrate existing legacy services to next-gen on their own timeline.
During the recent MEF 17 trade show, Spectrum Enterprise introduced its Hybrid SD-WAN solution and offered potential customers and partners to look at its proof of concept it was conducting with vendor partner Nuage Networks.
This service will allow businesses to leverage Ethernet performance, DOCSIS-based broadband internet connectivity and SD-WAN to create what the service provider calls Hybrid WANs by stitching together native Ethernet WANs and internet-based SD-WAN connections.
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Satya Parimi, group vice president of data and cloud products for the Spectrum Enterprise business unit at Charter Communications, told FierceTelecom this approach will set it apart from others providing SD-WAN.
“One unique twist in addition to what everyone else provides is the ability to stitch in Layer 2 locations,” Parimi said.
For a customer that has 10 WAN locations, which might require Charter to provision circuits outside of its territory, the cable MSO can install SD-WAN platforms at each location. From there, Charter can then extend the Ethernet WAN into the other locations over SD-WAN.
“You’re basically extending your Ethernet connection into those remote locations,” Parimi said. “This means that everything looks like it’s one giant WAN.”