NGN Professional Services

From the inception of Fastwire in 1998, a team of IP networking engineers has formed the foundation of the business, maturing over the years with experience and technology to form the Next Generation Networks team.

Today, Information Technology has become a critical component of most successful organisations and advanced IP technologies or carrier-based IP services are being considered to differentiate or reduce costs in a competitive market.

Leveraging this technology advancement may require specialised skills which can be either costly to acquire or time constraining.

The Fastwire NGN team possess a wealth of diverse skills across many technology domains; enabling them to resolve the most complex of scenarios in either Enterprise or Service Provider solutions. Fastwire can offer these services to augment existing resources or provided project-based solutions.

Our services include:

 

Solution Architecture and Planning

With industry transformation from a technology-driven to business and service oriented infrastructure, it is important to have a clear long term strategy for your service or network. Fastwire can provide leading experience in this area, delivering an overall end-to-end solution architecture, including:

  • Create an initial list of possible vendors or products which suit your requirements
  • Technical/cost evaluation
  • Vendor short listing
  • Generate detailed test plans
  • Design and build a lab
  • Test a vendor solution or a product according to the test plan design principles

In addition, Fastwire can make your solution vendor neutral, making sure that your service infrastructure and business is not locked to a particular vendor or proprietary protocol. We achieve this with architectures based on proven world standards, not specific products.

Technical Evaluations and Testing

In the current market, choosing the right product, technology and vendor can be a challenging task. What is more important – price, technology, size or power consumption?

In reality, when picking the right solution, all of these can be equally important and vital for your business. Based on our previous experience, current market/industry requirements and deep knowledge in wide range of technologies and solutions, Fastwire can help you to transform a solution design or a generic idea to the list of high level and detailed requirements and guide you through the vendor or product selection process:

  • Create an initial list of possible vendors or products which suit your requirements
  • Technical/cost evaluation
  • Vendor short listing
  • Generate detailed test plans
  • Design and build a lab
  • Test a vendor solution or a product according to the test plan design principles

Optionally, after this process, we can recommend a specific vendor or product which will meet your immediate and future requirements.

Solution Proof of Concept

Before transforming your idea or solution architecture into life, it is important to be confident that you’re making a right decision and the end result will deliver what you expect.

Proof of Concept testing (PoC) can bring you that confidence. Architects, designers and engineers from Fastwire can build a solution prototype and demonstrate its capabilities, so you know what may or may not happen after you implement your platform in your production environment.

  • Based on your solution or idea, we will:
  • Prepare a full scale or cut down solution version - prototype solution
  • Design and build a Proof of Concept lab environment
  • Produce a detailed PoC test plan based on your requirements
  • Execute the test plan
  • Test and demonstrate operation of required features and functions
  • Analyse test results
  • Make recommendations based on the test results analysis

Audit and Assessments

There are number of situations when Fastwire’s Audit and Assessment services can be useful:

  • Certification requirements from other organisations
  • Documentation incomplete, out of date or does not exist
  • Legacy systems, service or infrastructure which requires an update
  • Platform not maintained properly
  • Etc.

Depending on the situation and your requirements, our engineers can:

  • Reverse engineer and provide full documentation for existing platforms, networks or systems from scratch
  • Evaluate effectiveness, reliability and performance of existing systems, networks or processes
  • Verify available documentation and, if required, update it
  • Provide independent assessment of platform’s architecture, design and implementation
  • Perform security audits
  • Analyse which systems are currently in use and create an inventory list
  • Provide recommendations and action plan based on audit results

Design

When you have solution architecture in place, and know that it will work – it is a good time to ask the question: what should I do and how to implement it?

At this stage, you need experienced engineers with in-depth practical knowledge of technologies and products that you are planning to use. Fastwire can help you at this stage as well.

Based on our broad hands-on experience, we can analyse your solution and service requirement in every detail, and:

  • Determine the optimal technical solution
  • Formulate a detailed low-level implementation plan Define required hardware specifications
  • Prepare configurations, guides, templates, checklists and examples using industry best practices and vendor recommendations
  • Document every technology, device and feature used in your solution
  • Create a pre-production test plan which can be executed after implementation, to make sure that a solution meets requirements

If you have all of the above in place already, but you want an independent review - Fastwire can offer you a second opinion service, making sure that your design meets requirements in every detail and contains vendor, industry and security best practices.

Build and Implementation

Fastwire’s NGN Professional Services are not just about paperwork (solution diagrams and clouds, documentation, detailed designs, test plans, etc). We can help you to physically build your service, platform or network and make sure that it works.

Below are just a few points from our implementation plan:

  • Determine the optimal technical solution
  • Implement detailed design
  • Data centre and POP builds including racks, power and cabling
  • Physical hardware installation
  • Platform, system or network configuration
  • Pre-production testing

Platform and Service Integration/Deployment

To meet always changing market requirements, service/network infrastructure has to adapt to those changes as well as deliver current services that are in demand.

Those new services, features or platforms have to be deployed in the network regularly, introducing a risk to the existing services. Through intensive and careful planning, Fastwire NGN Professional Services can minimise those risks and help to integrate new services into existing infrastructure.

As part of integration, Fastwire will:

  • Interact with platform or service vendors
  • Plan, design and perform installation
  • Resolve possible interoperability or compatibility issues before service cutover
  • Commission the new platform into production

Fastwire’s broad knowledge of vendors, technologies and industry solutions will decrease time required for integration - providing faster rollout of new products and services.

Multi-Vendor Integration

In today’s highly dynamic market it is possible that your preferred vendor is not able to deliver service or technology you require to expand your service infrastructure and business.

In this case, it will be necessary to introduce another vendor into your infrastructure. However this can mean challenges at many levels.

To meet those challenges, Fastwire can provide:

  • Solution prototyping – proof of concept lab and testing
  • Multi-vendor experience and best practices
  • Use of standard protocols and technologies in your infrastructure to ensure vendor transparency
  • Resolution of possible interoperability issues
  • Single point of contact – you don’t need to chase the vendor, we will do it for you

Support and Optimisation

Building the infrastructure is only an early stage in a successful service delivery.

Managing existing infrastructure, service provisioning, monitoring and fault management are just a few examples of challenges which you need to face on daily basis to maintain a service network.

Fastwire can provide assistance to support your network, with both general IT capability and specific skills in areas such as:

  • Change control Capacity management
  • Service provisioning systems
  • Monitoring solutions
  • Fault management and correlation solutions
  • Troubleshooting and issue resolution
  • Problem root cause analysis

In addition to the above, Fastwire can help your engineers to optimise your network to achieve the best performance and reliability from your service infrastructure.