Software-defined networking company Affirmed Networks Inc. on Wednesday announced what it says is an industry-first “network slicing” feature that provides fine-grained control over corporate networks and paves the way for the installation of next-generation 5G networks.

Affirmed Networks’ vice president of marketing and product management Angela Whiteford said in an interview that network slicing is a feature that allows operators to configure virtual network instances optimized for the specific requirements of a customer or application, faster and more affordably than creating traditional dedicated networks.

Network slicing is said to be an important enabler for future 5G networks, as these will need to be able to support demands from a variety of users, including different industries, machines, autonomous vehicles and more. Network slicing offers a way to match the connectivity needs of different users while keeping spending on network resources down. Networks can be sliced and optimized for different bandwidth and latency requirements, for example.

Although most operators can implement a kind of network slicing functionality through Access Point Names that allows them to allocate network resources, this technology is rather limited, Affirmed Networks claimed.

By contrast, the company’s new Virtual Slice Selection Function is said to be the first such product to enable slicing across a range of legacy (2G, 3G and 4G), virtualized and multi-vendor networks, which means resources can be allocated according to device or service types, customer ID, location, time of day and other attributes. Affirmed Networks said its “5G ready” capabilities deliver enhanced control and flexibility over networks, while improving the overall quality of experience for end users.

The key advantage of all this is that operators will be able to offer differentiated services and also optimize the cost of delivering those services, Whiteford said. “You are basically able to tailor the network to deliver those services, improving the overall profitability of the service and the quality of the experience,” she added.

Image: Affirmed Networks