5 Easy Ways to Lower Your Network Costs

Rich Sabin CGNAT, vBNG

Governments are spending unprecedented amounts of money to expand broadband access. And broadband providers will be investing those monies to grow their networks and reach more subscribers. In this environment, who cares about lowering the costs of building out (and then maintaining) fiber or fixed wireless access networks?

Broadband providers care. No matter the size of the funding, successful businesses always keep an eye on costs. It’s what separates profitable businesses from unprofitable ones.

Thankfully, technology and new innovations have made it much easier to lower Total-Cost-of-Ownership (TCO) as you grow your network and subscribers. And it may be easier than you think. Below are five straightforward ways to reduce your network costs.

Focus on Scalable Solutions

The rush to make internet access available to everyone is on. Massive funding is being allocated to build out new networks.

This raises a key question: As new broadband subscribers are signed up, and the demand for bandwidth continues to increase, are traditional networks designed to handle this?

Unfortunately, the answer is no. Traditional router solutions lack scalability. To plan for increases in bandwidth demand, service providers need to purchase hardware-based routers with more capacity than they need today. This “over-provisioning” isn’t very cost-effective, since it wastes upfront capital expenses.

That’s where technology and innovation come in. Software-based (or virtual) router solutions are designed for scalability. Instead of manually configuring individual hardware-based routers, increasing network capacity with virtual routers can be accomplished with only a few software commands. When building networks for the future, broadband providers should focus on software solutions that can scale on-demand.

Avoid Proprietary Solutions

A proprietary solution is a hardware or software product or combination of products and services tied to a specific vendor, that excludes all other vendors.

Legacy networks are primarily built on proprietary solutions. While getting an all-in-one hardware and software solution may seem appealing, it also has drawbacks. For one, it locks you into that solution. With hardware and software aggregated into one solution, you can’t opt out for hardware that’s best for you, or software that’s best for you. This also means there may be features in the bundled solution that you don’t want or need. But you’ll still have to pay for them.

Of course, the biggest challenge with proprietary solutions is high costs. With only one vendor, there is no choice (and no competition). In building out your broadband network, an easy way to reduce network costs is to avoid proprietary solutions.

Re-Evaluate your Current Vendors

It’s natural to become comfortable (and complacent) with vendors you’ve been dealing with for years, or even decades. But these are the exact vendors you should be re-evaluating. Your comfort level may be costing you money.

When evaluating a vendor’s products, determine what’s most important to your business and not what’s most important from your vendor’s perspective. You may become aware of product features (and costs) that are greater than the benefits you’re receiving.

It’s also vital to determine if the product you’re using today will support your needs in the near future. Your current network infrastructure may not adequately support your continued subscriber growth.

Conserve IPv4 Addresses with CGNAT

As service providers sign up new subscribers, they’ll need to provide these subscribers with IP addresses. However, there are no new IPv4 addresses and buying or leasing them on the open market is becoming more expensive every week. Migrating to an IPv6 network is also costly; not just in monetary terms, but also in personnel and time requirements.

Carrier Grade Network Address Translation (CGNAT) offers a good solution. The main goal of CGNAT is to save public addresses. To accomplish this, CGNAT enables a special router to act as an agent between the internet and a service provider’s private network, so that one public IP address can represent hundreds, or even thousands of devices within the service provider’s network.

The cost savings with CGNAT can be significant. At a recent price of $44 for a perpetual IPv4 address, purchasing IPv4 addresses for 3,000 subscribers would cost $132,000.  The cost of CGNAT for 3,000 subscribers will vary (depending on the CGNAT vendor), but will be significantly less than the cost of buying IPv4 addresses.

Embrace Virtual Broadband Network Gateways (vBNGs)

Broadband Network Gateways are a vital network component that aggregates traffic from many subscribers and routes it to the network of the service provider. BNGs also enable service providers to authenticate and authorize users to establish and manage subscriber sessions, and ensure users receive the appropriate services.

Earlier we stated that broadband providers should focus on scalable solutions and avoid proprietary products. Sadly, most traditional hardware-based BNGs are proprietary solutions that aren’t very scalable.

Unlike a traditional hardware-based BNG, a software-based BNG separates the network functionality from the hardware. Decoupling the network services from the hardware makes it easier to expand network capacity and also provides a choice in hardware vendors. This choice enables service providers to benefit from the lower costs associated with commodity hardware.

How to Lower Network Costs with netElastic CGNAT and vBNG

netElastic’s software-based CGNAT is a cost-effective alternative to traditional proprietary solutions. It’s built on high-performance virtual router technology, which includes a scalable software architecture delivering a high-level of translation performance and supporting a broad range of additional routing capabilities.

netElastic can help lower costs by up to 80% compared to other CGNAT solutions. If you’re looking for an economical CGNAT, netElastic delivers unparalleled value with industry leading price/performance.

As mentioned earlier, traditional BNGs from router manufacturers bundle BNG software with their dedicated hardware, which increases both capital and operating costs. The significant upfront costs of fixed-capacity hardware appliances are made worse by their lack of scalability, requiring you to purchase additional fixed-capacity BNGs when their capacity limit is reached.

netElastic developed one of the first software-based (or virtual) BNGs and brings greater scalability and lower costs to BNGs. Unlike hardware-based BNGs, netElastic vBNG enables service providers to scale up available bandwidth capacity on-demand. It also separates the data plane and control plane so each can be scaled independently, providing the ability to dynamically adjust the network based on constantly changing requirements.

netElastic vBNG uses commodity x86 servers, which has helped providers save up to 70% compared to traditional hardware-based BNGs. For growing broadband providers constantly adding new subscribers, a cost-effective vBNG can be an easy way to lower your network costs.

Summary

There are many ways to lower your network costs based on your unique situation. We’ve tried to highlight five strategies that many broadband providers are successfully using.

To learn more about how actual broadband providers are lowering their network costs, please feel free to read any of the following netElastic case studies: