Adre Beijen, the Network Innovation Head of KPN shared with us KPN's story about the second network evolution at Ultra-broadband Forum (UBBF 2017). Watch it here.
Interview Transcript:
Light Reading (LR):
I'm here with Andre Beijen, the head of Network Innovation for the Dutch Telco KPN. KPN is currently going through a major digital transformation program. So Andre, can you tell us about the role of the network in that?
Andre Beijen:
Okay, so, we started several years ago on the IT side. So to make the customer interaction more digitalized. So, that’s a huge step towards more customer-intimate interaction. And now we are redesigning the network to fit more into that customer-centric way of thinking, so we try to digitalize the network.
LR:
Right. And you had the strategy you're calling the second network evolution.
Andre Beijen:
Yeah, so the first one was basically going from traditional telephone and leased line services towards all IP. So and now we are more into separating user traffic from control traffic into more software-defined network, so it's the next evolution.
LR:
Right. And so far, what kind of results have you been seeing?
Andre Beijen:
So, it's been a very interesting journey so far. We did a lot of testing, so we wanted to grab the idea and test the concept. And that is very interesting and now we are nearly ready to, in a few weeks we are going to launch full services towards enterprise customers. So it’ll be very exciting moment.
LR:
Right. Now, elsewhere you're also working on some plans for network automations. So what are those?
Andre Beijen:
Yeah, so we realized very early in the process that you cannot automate complexity. So we started by cleaning up our legacy networks a few years ago. So, we phased out a lot of old-fashioned services and cleaned up rationalized networks.
And now we getting to a phase that it's relatively simple to automate repetitive handling of human interaction. So it's actually in the beginning of automation, but we intend to go all the way to zero touch networking. In the SDN world, it's theoretically possible. In the legacy world, we are not sure yet.
LR:
Right, that’s an impressive and brave objective. How long before you get to zero or near zero touch?
Andre Beijen:
Now, we can actually go quite fast. So the whole industry is putting a massive amount of resources and money into understanding network automation. So we can learn a lot from our ecosystem, from our colleagues, competitors for those, from our vendors. So I expect the first result very soon, but to fully automate our legacy network that would take a few years.
