Bumblebee Intelligent Edge Deployments for the Telecom Industry

In the telecom industry, a facilities-based service provider refers to a service provider that owns its own fiber infrastructure. For example, a regional fiber network provider such as REV or Stratus Networks, or a tier-1 provider such as AT&T.

On the other hand, a non-facilities-based service provider refers to a service provider that leases the network from facilities-based providers and resells it to end customers. For example, providers such as SolEx or UNS, or a global provider like GTT.

The Bumblebee Intelligent Edge is purpose-built to serve the telecom industry. It supports both types of service providers. The only difference in deployment is whether VLAN tags are applied to the service provider-facing WAN interface. Full visibility, troubleshooting tools, advanced service features such as OOB PDU Management and Multi-level Access Control, and cellular integration are available in either deployment scenario.

This document describes the key points for each deployment scenario.

Facilities-based Service Providers

For facilities-based service providers, the market is divided into retail and wholesale segments.

In the retail market, the service provider delivers internet access using its own circuits directly to end customers. In the wholesale market, the service provider leases or buys circuits from partner carriers. In both cases, the provider owns the end-customer relationship.

Retail Market

For the facilities-based service providers, Bumblebee CPE replaces the traditional layer-2 NID in the Dedicated Internet Access (DIA) circuit, as shown below.

Bumblebee CPE replaces the NID in DIA Circuit

In this scenario, a Bumblebee CPE may be configured either in Pass Through Mode or Router Mode. There is VLAN tag and/or Q-in-Q tag applied to the WAN Interface.

Customers may choose to select the CPE product such as BN-CPE-1000C or BN-CPE-1000FC for seamless 5G cellular failover.

Wholesale Market

In the wholesale market, a facilities-based service provider is no different from a non-facilities-based service provider. How Bumblebee helps them gain visibility and monitoring capabilities with a unified solution is described in the next section for non-facilities-based service providers.

Non-facilities-based Service Providers

For the Non-facilities-based service providers, Bumblebee CPEs are deployed between the service providers NID and firewalls/SD-WAN routers, as shown below.

Bumblebee CPE Deployment for Non-facilities-based Service Providers

In this scenario, a Bumblebee CPE may be configured either in Pass Through Mode or Router Mode. There is no VLAN tag applied to the WAN interface.