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Zeetta Networks signs co-operation agreement with Bristol Is Open

Press release issued: 12 October 2016

Zeetta Networks announced today [Wednesday 12 October] that it has signed an agreement with Bristol Is Open for the deployment of Zeetta’s NetOS® on the Bristol Is Open network in the world's first use of open networking technologies orchestrating a diverse Smart City network.

Bristol Is Open’s backbone network uses the council-owned fiber-optic network to link several nodes around the city.  A variety of wireless access networks branch out from the core fiber network to deliver user data rates up to 1 Gbps using a combination of Wi-Fi, LTE Advanced and, in the future, other more advanced wireless access technologies such as 60 GHz wireless.

Distributed sensors across the city supply the network with information about many aspects of city life including energy, air quality, temperature, humidity and traffic flows; University of Bristol’s  supercomputing and cloud resources are also connected to the core fiber network to host and analyze information flows, in real-time, providing open, accessible data for the development of a wide range of applications and services to improve the modern urban living and explore solutions on a city-wide scale.

According to the agreement, Zeetta will install, maintain and support NetOS® on the Bristol Is Open network to provide a multi-tenant, multi-technology software platform which will enable ‘Experimentation-as-a-Service’ in accordance to Bristol Is Open’s mission. In the heart of the platform is Zeetta’s Network Provisioning Portal which allows service providers to acquire, on-demand, a ‘slice’ of Bristol Is Open’s physical network for the development of their own application or service.

The agreement announced today extends the cooperation existing cooperation between Zeetta Networks and Bristol Is Open their joint participation in the REPLICATE Project, a €25million Horizon2020 Project, one of the largest Smart City projects in Europe, involving three ‘lighthouse’ cities including Bristol.

Barney Smith, CEO of Bristol Is Open commented: “Having Zeetta Networks’ technology as part of the Bristol Is Open platform will consolidate and extend the capabilities that we presently offer our partners.  Their technology is pioneering in the world of SDN and NFV technology and we look forward to working with the team and Bristol Is Open’s ecosystem partners to further develop the network along with city applications with our experimenters and commercial partners.”

Vassilis Seferidis, CEO of Zeetta Networks said: “Bristol is leading the way in implementing cutting-edge networking technologies to tackle large-scale urban problems. Today’s announcement will allow us to go one step further and explore new business models on how public-private partnerships can work together with open technology platforms for an efficient use and monetisation of city resources and infrastructure. The ability of Zeetta’s NetOS® to virtualize and slice different types of network resources including optical, packet and wireless is the catalyst for the exploration of such opportunities.”

Further information

About Zeetta Networks Limited
Zeetta Networks offers Open Networking solutions for heterogeneous networks based on patented Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Networking Virtualization (NV/NFV) technologies originally developed by the High Performance Networks Group at the University of Bristol.

The company’s main product, NetOS®, is an extended, vendor-agnostic SDN Controller, with a built-in network virtualization engine, which supports optical, packet, wireless and IoT networks. It provides network operators with a centralised view of their extended physical network and enables construction of virtual network ‘slices’ (i.e. separate logically-isolated sub-networks) which could be presented to Service Providers for the deployment of B2B or B2C services such as Ultra-HD video distribution, city-wide Wi-Fi, Internet of Things (IoT) and M2M deployments.

About Bristol Is Open
How cities work is changing. Bristol Is Open is a research infrastructure to explore developments in software, hardware and telecom networks that enable more interaction between people and places and more machine-to-machine communication.  The project uses a high performance software defined network as the city operating system, then internet of things platforms and big data analytics feed an emerging number of smart city applications. This is giving people more ability to interact, work and play with the city that they live in, and will help cities address some of the biggest challenges of modern urban life.

Bristol Is Open is a joint venture between the University of Bristol and Bristol City Council.

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