Public Telecomm Solves IPv4 Exhaustion & Saves ~$2 Million

Transcription

Telecommunications Company Shentel Communications is the sixth largest public wireless company in the United States, operating a digital wireless and wireline network in rural Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania.

Harris Duncan, VP of Network Engineering at Shentel discusses deploying A10 Thunder CGN, which allowed the company to solve it’s IPv4 exhaustion problem. A10 Thunder CGN’s CGNAT features help manage its limited IPv4 address space without the need to purchase additional space on the open market.

AI Transcription:

I am VP of Network Engineering here at Shentel. My team and I oversee the planning, design and engineering and deployment of all Shentel network infrastructure that supports all of our lines of business.

That’s from video to voice to data. My team also includes the Network Operation Center, who is now responsible for the monitoring and management of those networks.

So under the Globe Fiber brand, Shinto offers fibre broadband services to our business and residential customers and under the Legacy Shentel brand we offer video and data and regulated and unregulated services through the cable networks.

We are a cable operator as well as well as the DSL Internet access.

So we’re also an ARLA and in our area in the part of Virginia and then under the Beam Internet brand Shentel offers, you know, fixed wireless Internet service using existing cell tower in our network, all of which of course are owned by Shentel.

We’re seeing more and more networks transition to IPv4, but there still remains a large portion of that legacy internet that is moving away from IPv4 more slowly than we would like.

There is no expiration date set at this time on IPv4, so we have to have an expectation that IPv4 has to continue to exist in our ecosystem for whoever knows how long.

So the A10 platform really allows Shentel to continue to support our IPv4 space as we continue to our transition to IPv6.

Payback’s immediate. A typical site market generally requires when we launch a market generally requires on the average of at least a slash 20, which will support a little bit more than 4,000 subs.

So in the beginning when people were selling you excess IPv4 space, you know the cost per it was between 10 to 15 dollars, depending on the block size, the bigger the block to lower the cost.

Today that cost is around 50 to 55 dollars an IP, again depending on the block size.

So us deploying or Shentel deploying the A10 alliances from the very beginning, it resulted in immediate savings on day 1 because we were not continuously acquire that IP space to support the increasing demand of our customers.

A10 Thunder Appliances are currently supporting, I would say around 90,000 plus subs today, which is expected to increase another 15,000 subs in 2022.

So if you use the market pricing for IPv4 space over the past 5 years, conservatively we’re estimating a savings of more than 2 million dollar. That’s savings that we did not have to spend to acquire additional IPv4 space.

Well, simply, you know a solution that exceeds all of our requirements backed by really a team with great professionals who want a partner for success in the relationship between Shentel and A10 has been just absolutely phenominal.

It is absolutely vital that the reputation, the commitment of the vendor that you partner with can support all your business objectives.

There’s an extreme value when you can with a strong vendor who comes who continues to evolve as Shentel grows. And that describes A10 perfectly.