As the digital revolution continues, consumers and enterprises are more reliant than ever on service providers like you to keep them connected. But scaling and supporting your networks to keep up with demand isn’t just complicated, it’s expensive. F5 solutions can help you optimize and monetize your current infrastructure, so you can implement new services quickly, keeping your network competitive and increasing profits.
And because threats continue to evolve as well, you’ll get integrated security solutions that continue to protect your network.
5G networks offer opportunities to broaden the value that your network brings by connecting more people and more IoT devices in more ways. With the sheer number of devices projected, there’s immense pressure to scale networks while maintaining reliability and performance. And of course, with more connections, come more threats. Properly securing networks in a 5G world is complicated, yet vital.
F5 offers solutions to help you scale and secure your network, expand your service portfolio, quickly launch new services, and experiment without impacting your entire network. Our solutions cover your network from the edge through the core, from the data center to the cloud.
Increasing and evolving threats require a multi-faceted approach. Security measures should be applied across every domain in service provider networks, as well as between users and the applications they are accessing across your network. F5 solutions provide multi-layer and multi-domain protection.
Implementing Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is key to improving agility and scalability, and it requires appropriate management and orchestration. F5 provides solutions that deliver the core functions service providers need to transition from existing infrastructures to fully integrated and orchestrated NFV architectures.
Increasing complexity in networks and traffic patterns present service providers with constant scalability and performance challenges in the data plane. F5 solutions enable a simplified, high-performance network that delivers a high quality of experience for subscribers and maximizes profitability.
The rollout of LTE brought with it massive growth in Diameter and DNS signaling—and the requirement continues to grow. F5 provides a strategic point of control in the signaling plane to help service providers simplify the network architecture, efficiently manage resources, respond to changes in real time, and quickly roll out new services to optimize the customer experience.
Equipment deployed in a provider network needs to be safe, reliable, and easy to deploy. Critical F5 service provider products are Network Equipment Building Systems (NEBS) compliant. The NEBS standards in GR-63 (minimum spatial and environmental criteria) and GR-1089 (Electromagnetic Compatibility and Electrical Safety) provide uniform criteria for equipment design intended to reduce the cost of deployment and maintain reliability of the network, even in extreme conditions. These standards are why telephones work after an extreme event, like an earthquake or a severe thunderstorm. NEBS requirements are utilized all over the world for a host of commercial, utility, and defense applications.
Security for Service Providers:
Security Without Boundaries: Multi-Domain and Multi-Layer. The security threat landscape continues to rapidly evolve and is now impacting broadband networks at every domain. Network congestion, service degradation, and manipulation of network resources and applications are increasing. Using a programmable, high-performance services fabric, F5 helps service providers protect network resources and functions while minimizing application downtime and maximizing end-user quality of experience.
Core Network and Data Center Security
Get protection at every layer. Service provider core network elements and support infrastructure are more prone to outside threats than ever before. Advanced persistent threats (APTs), DDoS attacks, and DNS-level attacks threaten network and service availability and performance. With F5 solutions, service providers gain a unified, multi-layer defense to protect the entire network infrastructure.
Carrier-Class Network Firewall
Solve Scaling and Network Security Challenges
Always-evolving technologies expose communication service providers to numerous threats—brand damage, subscriber service disruption, and next generation attacks that pilfer private information. Using F5 carrier class network firewall, service providers gain extensive security and scale critical for accommodating increased network traffic, growth in subscriber devices, and the internet of things that keep our digital world connected.
Protect Core Network Elements and Every Layer In-Between
F5’s carrier-class network firewall provides end-to-end security. From customer billing and provisioning systems to protecting LTE network infrastructure and strengthening mobile device security—APTs and DDoS attacks don’t stand a chance. Our multilayered redundant security platform supports new 4G-LTE, 5G, and VoLTE technologies and easily integrates with today’s NFV environments. Defending assets at scale, without impairing performance is the security approach that earns us trust by all 10 of the Tier-1 operators.
Carrier Grade NAT
Managing the IPv4 to IPv6 Transition
The worldwide proliferation of wireless devices and the Internet of Things (IoT) have led to the rapid depletion of IPv4 addresses. For service providers, it’s a challenge to support and manage existing IPv4 devices and content traversing the network, while at the same time transitioning to support newer IPv6 devices and applications. And because IPv6 devices and content are not backwards-compatible with IPv4, your IPv6 migration strategy needs to support the coexistence of IPv4 and IPv6 during the gradual transition.
Seamlessly Support IPv4 and IPv6 Networks
As part of F5s security solutions, carrier-grade NAT (CGNAT) provides a complete set of tools to help service providers manage the depletion of IPv4 addresses and migrate to IPv6. These include tunneling with Dual-Stack Lite capabilities as well as native network address translation solutions such as NAT44, NAT64, NAPT, and 464XLAT. These highly scalable, high-performance solutions can help you be more efficient in managing IPv4 address depletion while seamlessly migrating to IPv6.
Intelligent DNS
Ensuring continuous availability for subscribers
DNS is one of the most important components in a service provider’s networking architecture. If DNS goes down, services fail to function properly and the subscriber experience suffers. DNS is also a tempting target for DDoS attacks that can affect all external data center services. With the growth of 4G/LTE and new technologies that create a flood of packet-based traffic, operators need a faster, more flexible, and more intelligent DNS infrastructure that can scale to ensure availability and security in the face of increasing demand.
Dynamic and scalable DNS
F5’s Intelligent DNS for service providers creates a dynamic service-delivery infrastructure that proactively scales and adapts to maximize DNS availability and performance based on changing network and data center conditions. The solution consolidates LDNS, authoritative DNS, and infrastructure DNS and can handle more than 20 million requests per second on a single platform, ensuring stability and security to deliver the best possible experience for subscribers.
Application-Layer Security
Protecting at Every Layer
As advanced persistent threats (APTs) and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks increase in volume and sophistication, attacks have become multi-layered, targeting various network elements, DNS infrastructure, and web-based applications — sometimes all at the same time. Advanced attacks now aim past the networks, past the data center perimeters, and directly at the applications. This can disrupt service provider hosted web applications, customer billing and provisioning systems, customer service applications, and other hosted applications. A secure service provider network design requires protection at every layer.
A Complete Application-Layer Firewall
F5 provides the most agile and scalable web application firewall (WAF) available. F5 Application Security Manager (ASM) leverages F5’s deep application experience and fluency to detect and mitigate HTTP-based attacks. It protects vital applications with comprehensive, policy-based web application security that blocks attacks and secures data center applications against threats and zero-day attacks. With industry-leading layer-7 DDoS defenses and SIP DoS protection, the solution detects, mitigates, and enables granular visibility into attacks while scaling to ensure maximum performance.
Signaling Security
Protect your network resources. Mobile operators are experiencing security incidents and attacks resembling those that ISPs have been experiencing for years. Network congestion, service degradation or complete outage, and exposure of user information and signaling messages are serious concerns. F5 provides a consolidated signaling platform that protects your network resources from signaling storms and other signaling security threats.
Diameter Security
Building a Secure Signaling Architecture
As service providers deploy IP-based LTE networks with a flatter and more open architecture, they are inherently more vulnerable to security threats that are increasing in both volume and diversity. The LTE evolved packet core (EPC) – as well as signaling and subscriber information – is not well-protected from attacks that come from outside the network access points. Equally troublesome is the rising trend of signaling storms that may occur due to operational issues or from malicious attacks.
Roaming agreements and third-party content providers complicate the situation by adding outside network connections. F5 offers a strategic approach to security with a consolidated Diameter signaling platform that optimizes the signaling network and protects against signaling security threats.
LTE Roaming
Optimize delivery of roaming services
Communications service providers (CSPs) are facing a major shift in how traditional voice and data services are delivered and managed. With global travel and communications, consumers want services available no matter where in the world they are. Mobile voice and data services need to be accessible outside consumers’ home territories so they can make calls and connect to the Internet with minimal configuration changes. F5’s LTE Roaming solution delivers an ecosystem of products and services that enable CSPs to deliver key LTE features by making the infrastructure available and secure, extending functionality, and simplifying the process of creating advanced roaming solutions.
Expand coverage, maintain availability, and reduce costs
F5 delivers a complete solution to help CSPs meet all new infrastructure requirements and optimize data capabilities of LTE roaming agreements with key partners. BIG-IP Diameter Traffic Management can deliver secure, reliable services and scale connectivity to multiple roaming partners, ensuring quality customer experiences and greater mobile revenues.
Network Functions Virtualization:
Moving Toward a Virtualized Network—Orchestration, Abstraction, and Programmability
Network functions virtualization (NFV) architectures provide the necessary network flexibility to enable new service delivery models and elastic network scaling to reduce total cost of ownership by leveraging common off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware.
Fundamentally, NFV begins with the shift toward the virtualization of network components currently deployed on purpose-built hardware. As you evolve your networks to NFV, the abstraction of the control-plane and data-forwarding plane simplifies the creation and management of new services. At the same time, you benefit from a programmable network based on industry standard open APIs that give you greater flexibility and agility.
The orchestration of networks, fully virtualized network or a hybrid, lets you dynamically instantiate new services and deliver a network that can provide subscribers with more personalized service as well as an improved quality of experience (QOE).
Putting It All Together—F5’s Broad Portfolio of VNFs
Whether your goal is to deploy a completely virtualized network or a hybrid network where only some of the functionality will be virtualized, BIG-IP products are available as both carrier-grade, purpose-built hardware and virtual editions (VEs) on COTS hardware.
VNFs available on the BIG-IP platform include Virtual Firewall (vFW), Virtual Application Delivery Controllers (vADC), Virtual Policy Manager (vPEM), Virtual DNS (vDNS), and more.
Economic advantages of open architecture platforms in NFV deployments
To sustain a profitable business model while experiencing tremendous growth in traffic, the world’s largest operators are turning to NFV with OpenStack in an open architecture.
One Tier-1 U.S. operator has collaborated with multiple vendors to create an NFV architecture design. Together, they engaged ACG Research to analyze the economics of two designs: the open architecture platform and a more “tightly bundled alternative.”
Over five years, the cumulative TCO of the open architecture platform is estimated to be 53% lower and three times faster in deploying new service offerings, when compare to the bundled approach.
Realizing the Benefits of a Growing Partner Ecosystem
To realize the benefits of NFV, including the flexibility of deploying services anywhere, anytime and spinning up new services and applications in minutes, you need the ability to manage the multiple VNFs in your network while complying with interoperability standards.
All F5 solutions, including hardware and virtual editions, run on the same operating system (TMOS) and have standard open APIs/ REST APIs that can plug into management and orchestration solutions from Cisco, ALU Cloudband HPE, and others.
F5—An Active Contributor to NFV Standards
NFV has been gaining momentum largely because of service provider initiatives for deploying a cost-effective, scalable, and elastic network and the push by industry standards organizations to standardize on how best to deploy NFV. F5 is a member of and actively participates in ETSI NFV, IETF, OpenStack Forum, Open Networking Foundation and other NFV/SDN standards bodies and consortia, ensuring that you can integrate F5s solutions within your NFV network architecture.
Data Traffic Management:
Simplify and Scale the Data Plane
As data growth continues to explode, service providers face challenges in being able to scale effectively and maintain fast network performance while still growing revenues. Networks and traffic patterns are rapidly evolving and becoming more complex. F5’s data traffic management solutions help service providers solve these challenges to gain unparalleled capacity and scalability. The result is a scalable, high-performance network that delivers a high subscriber quality of experience and maximizes profitability.
Quality of Experience
Improve subscriber satisfaction and ARPU. Staying competitive means delivering innovative services and best-in-class customer experiences. It’s not easy when OTT providers are introducing new services and straining already-congested networks with streaming video and other resource-intensive content. With F5, you can simplify and optimize your network resources while gaining more granular insight into the network to improve the subscriber quality of experience and profitability.
Context-Aware Policy Enforcement
Better Insight to Deliver a Better QoE
Even though many service providers have deployed 4G LTE networks, subscriber demands on bandwidth continue to skyrocket along with quality of experience (QoE) expectations and the desire for new services. Competition from OTT content providers adds to the strain on your network as well to your need to bring innovative new services to market faster.
Understanding subscriber behavior – from which applications subscribers use to when and how they use them – is key to overcoming these challenges. With F5, you can gain context-aware insight into the network and your subscriber base to help you scale your network efficiently and deliver the right services and rate plans to the right subscribers.
Adaptive Bit Rate (ABR) Video Detection and Control
BIG-IP Policy Enforcement Manager (PEM) lets service providers detect ABR video and control the network resources it consumes—especially premium RAN resources.
Context-Aware Visibility and Control
F5 Policy Enforcement Manager gives service providers advanced insight, subscriber awareness, and traffic steering functionality, along with the ability to integrate with management and orchestration systems. Gaining a better understanding of how the network is being utilized enables you to build and manage a more efficient network architecture, develop profitable new services, and ultimately improve your subscribers’ quality of experience.
TCP Optimization
Optimize subscriber QoE
To deliver the best possible quality of experience (QoE) to subscribers, service providers continually spend time and resources on optimizing performance. Methods such as video compression and caching have been effective, but the increased use of encrypted connections and the emergence of protocols like HTTP 2.0 are diminishing the benefits of these technologies. F5’s TCP optimization technology offers significant returns in performance improvement for a low investment of time and resources.
Performance where it counts
F5 provides an optimized TCP stack that significantly improves subscribers’ QoE without the need to change application and services. It is more effective than other optimization technologies because it focuses on optimizing the TCP protocol, which accounts for the vast majority of Internet traffic. Because it is not dependent on inspecting content, it can optimize encrypted connections. Best of all, TCP optimization is built into the F5 BIG-IP platform, so F5 customers can benefit at no extra cost.
GI Consolidation
Reduce complexity and cost in the core network. Investing resources in the core network can create challenges in managing and scaling various point products. The result is increased network complexity — and increased CapEx and OpEx. F5 offers an intelligent, unified platform that consolidates critical traffic management functions to simplify your architecture and reduce costs. The result is a scalable, high-performance solution that enables you to introduce new services to market faster.
S/Gi Network Simplification
Optimize, Monetize and Secure Mobile Broadband Networks
Service providers need to differentiate their services to attract subscribers and generate new revenue streams, and that means delivering new services and functionality within the S/Gi portion of the network. While many vendors sell point products that meet specific functional requirements they ultimately lead to to device sprawl in the S/Gi network. F5’s unified platform offers a simpler solution that can dramatically improve efficiency, scale network services more cost-effectively, and enhance performance to optimize, secure, and monetize the network.
Streamline to Save Money and Enhance Network Quality
The F5 solution for S/Gi network simplification is based on high-performance, highly scalable, carrier-grade hardware and software that integrate key S/Gi network functions into one platform. Adding and removing these services is easy, and the unified framework means there is a common technology to understand and manage—so you can significantly reduce total cost of ownership (TCO ) by deploying far fewer devices and streamlining your network. F5 also provides multi-layered security that can handle the most demanding network attacks, and policy enforcement capabilities to generate new revenue streams.
Carrier-Grade NAT
Managing the IPv4 to IPv6 Transition
The worldwide proliferation of wireless devices and the Internet of Things (IoT) have led to the rapid depletion of IPv4 addresses. For service providers, it’s a challenge to support and manage existing IPv4 devices and content traversing the network, while at the same time transitioning to support newer IPv6 devices and applications. And because IPv6 devices and content are not backwards-compatible with IPv4, your IPv6 migration strategy needs to support the coexistence of IPv4 and IPv6 during the gradual transition.
Seamlessly Support IPv4 and IPv6 Networks
As part of F5s security solutions, carrier-grade NAT (CGNAT) provides a complete set of tools to help service providers manage the depletion of IPv4 addresses and migrate to IPv6. These include tunneling with Dual-Stack Lite capabilities as well as native network address translation solutions such as NAT44, NAT64, NAPT, and 464XLAT. These highly scalable, high-performance solutions can help you be more efficient in managing IPv4 address depletion while seamlessly migrating to IPv6.
Intelligent DNS
Ensuring continuous availability for subscribers
DNS is one of the most important components in a service provider’s networking architecture. If DNS goes down, services fail to function properly and the subscriber experience suffers. DNS is also a tempting target for DDoS attacks that can affect all external data center services. With the growth of 4G/LTE and new technologies that create a flood of packet-based traffic, operators need a faster, more flexible, and more intelligent DNS infrastructure that can scale to ensure availability and security in the face of increasing demand.
Dynamic and scalable DNS
F5’s Intelligent DNS for service providers creates a dynamic service-delivery infrastructure that proactively scales and adapts to maximize DNS availability and performance based on changing network and data center conditions. The solution consolidates LDNS, authoritative DNS, and infrastructure DNS and can handle more than 20 million requests per second on a single platform, ensuring stability and security to deliver the best possible experience for subscribers.
Signaling Solutions:
Managing the Rapid Growth in Signaling Traffic
As LTE networks continue to grow, the control plane is bombarded with massive volumes of signaling and unprecedented traffic patterns. Without proper network planning, the results can be damaging to network performance, subscriber satisfaction, and profitability. F5 has designed dynamic architecture in signaling management around Diameter and DNS that helps service providers offer quality customer experiences while enabling scalability, supporting rapid rollout of new services and business models, and successfully managing growth.
Signaling Solutions
Diameter Signaling Management
Take control of Diameter signaling. As Diameter signaling messaging grows exponentially, service providers need a multi-functional Diameter platform. BIG-IP Diameter Traffic Management enables service providers to manage network complexity with context-aware routing, engage in secure roaming, and successfully integrate all Diameter and legacy elements.
Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Signaling
Get scalability, availability, and reliability for SIP Proxy, Session Border Controller, media servers, and other SIP devices. BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) can distribute and balance SIP and RTP traffic among multiple SIP devices so service availability is guaranteed even under high call volumes. Additionally, the F5 solution can perform advanced health checks on the SIP devices, routing SIP clients away from unstable or unreliable devices and providing increased reliability to existing SIP solutions.
Intelligent DNS Services
Scale and secure your DNS infrastructure. The growth of personalized operator services and media-rich apps on mobile devices—along with new networking technologies—is putting an enormous strain on service provider network control and data planes. F5 offers a comprehensive, authoritative solution that intelligently optimizes, scales and secures DNS infrastructures.
