RTK-Service supports Juniper's performance on Rostelecom's network

2025: Juniper Advanced Post-Warranty Hardware Support

The ICT company RTK-Service accepted 72 thousand units of components for equipment/in the IPMPLS Juniper infrastructure of PJSC "" for expanded post-warranty support and comprehensive service. Rostelecom The company announced this on February 13, 2025.

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Фото: Rostelecom

The partnership of RTK-Service with PJSC Rostelecom includes expanded post-warranty service of diverse equipment, including routers and switches installed on trunk and regional nodes throughout Russia, from Kaliningrad to Kamchatka. 

Work on the project was carried out in stages over 3 years. During this time, RTK-Service processed more than 3,500 requests for Juniper technical support from Rostelecom, of which more than 1,100 were for repair and replacement of faulty components. The contractor managed to achieve SLA within the framework of the project of 99.9%, which is comparable to the level of service from the vendor who provided support earlier. The expertise and the developed methodology of technical support engineers and circuit engineers for the repair of equipment of the Competence Center for Network Technologies RTK-Service helped to achieve such results. As of February 2025, the company provides a full cycle of technical support, thanks to which the speed of incident response increases significantly.

Expanded post-warranty support means that Rostelecom receives not only classic, but also the so-called focused support - a regular audit that allows you to quickly identify hidden threats that can have a negative impact on hardware and software. RTK-Service engineers systematically carry out diagnostics of the equipment condition and signal to the customer about possible malfunctions to perform preventive actions - repair or timely replacement of equipment. The task of import substitution is also constantly kept in focus by RTK-Service engineers, which allows rationally planning the stages of replacing Western equipment on the operator's network with Russian equipment, having previously tested it in the Network Testing Laboratory.

Post-warranty service of telecommunication equipment is one of the key activities of the Competence Center for Network Technologies RTK-Service. We practice a preventive approach to identifying and eliminating risks, and thus extend the life cycle of scarce equipment, ensure our customers uninterrupted operation of telecom infrastructure. In general, we are seeing a trend when the comprehensive maintenance of turnkey network equipment is becoming more and more popular among the Big Four and regional operators, "said Andrey Kononenko, General Director of RTK-Service.

In recent years, PJSC Rostelecom has made significant progress in the field of import substitution, but it is not yet possible to replace all the equipment available on the networks, this is a long and multi-stage process. To service imported hardware, we took a non-standard path even before Western vendors left Russia, namely, we began the transition from technical support of the manufacturer to service by Russian companies. The quality of such service is often higher, for example, in terms of the speed of processing applications, and the cost is significantly lower. Partnership with RTK-Service on post-warranty service projects gives us confidence in the stable functioning of the infrastructure and the possibility of further optimal development and modernization of networks in the context of growing traffic, - commented Alexey Sapunov, Senior Vice President for Technical Infrastructure of PJSC Rostelecom.

In addition to Juniper equipment, RTK-Service provides post-warranty service for all Huawei equipment on the telecom operator's network. As part of the project, the engineers of the Competence Center for Network Technologies managed to increase the average rating for technical support applications from 4.96 in 2023 to 4.99 in 2024.

2023: Acceptance of all Huawei equipment for technical support

On October 20, 2023, the IT company RTK-Service announced that it had accepted all Huawei equipment installed on Rostelecom networks for maintenance and support: from Chukotka to Kaliningrad, as well as at the junction of Rostelecom networks with Western networks. As a result, according to the customer's estimates, the quality of service work has increased, and the time for eliminating incidents in networks has decreased. The trend of comprehensive servicing of all equipment of the departed vendor in the customer's circuit is becoming more and more popular among companies with a large territorial distribution.

As reported, at the end of March 2022, Huawei stopped supplying network equipment to Russia, and from January 1, 2023, it closed the Enterprise Business Group division in the country, which was engaged in corporate sales of storage systems, telecommunications equipment and other solutions in the field of information and communication technologies (ICT). Technical support, service, software updates have also been discontinued.

Huawei equipment within the framework of Rostelecom's infrastructure for November 2023 is used on mobile communications, home Internet and telephony networks: in broadband access and GPON technology, underwater fiber-optic communication line between the mainland and Sakhalin Island, optical equipment, switching equipment and other critical elements for network health. After the departure of the Western vendor, the question arose not only of import substitution, but also of ensuring stable support for equipment: without due attention and against the background of lack of supplies, this problem threatened to increase the number of incidents on communication lines.

To ensure the uninterrupted operation of Rostelecom networks, RTK-Service took over the service and maintenance of all the equipment of the Asian vendor used on the networks of the largest Russian operator. Infrastructure facilities were divided into three groups in terms of criticality. The first is optical equipment and large machrutisers, the so-called backbone. The second group is IP and broadband equipment. The third group includes equipment "outside the life cycle," which is no longer receives support and development from a vendor around the world.

The project started in July 2023 and assumed strict compliance with SLA at the level of deadlines previously implemented by the vendor and corresponding to the level of criticality of systems. For applications of the first priority, specialists withstood the same SLA in terms of recovery time as the vendor - 4 hours. However, according to the results of the first 3 months of work, the actual average recovery time was reduced by almost 2 times - up to 2 hours 8 minutes. According to the analysis carried out by RTK-Service during the work on the project, the average level of assessment of the results of work on applications was 4.99 out of 5 points. With the support of the vendor, this figure for 2022 was kept at 4.98. In addition, RTK-Service experts on average decide the application in 9.27 days, while the vendor took 14 days in 2022.

One of the key features of the project is the territorial distribution of Rostelecom networks, which connect the whole country in the range of 11 time zones. RTK-Service is represented in 22 regions of Russia - this allows you to provide service in compliance with SLA on any section of the network.

In addition to Huawei equipment, RTK-Service localized expertise and production support chains for all departed Western vendors. Also, a multi-tender laboratory has been formed at the production facilities of RTK-Service, which presents all the lines of departed foreign vendors. All of the above will allow the telecom market of the Russian Federation to buy time and hold out until the transition to domestic equipment. In turn, RTK-Service, having competencies in all Western vendors, as well as constantly participating in testing domestic solutions, can become a link between the manufacturer and the end customer in terms of adapting the equipment being implemented. We call this process "import exchange." told Andrey Kononenko, General Director of RTK-Service

According to RTK-Service experts, the needs for a comprehensive equipment service for vendors who have left the Russian market by domestic companies will only grow. IT integrators who are actively developing the technical support market after 2022, as a rule, do not have a sufficient regional base of performers for such work, while for companies with a wide regional network this is a critical point. The need to concentrate commands on products becomes obvious, while guaranteeing the level of expertise and compliance with SLA, and therefore the uninterrupted operation of the network. At the same time, the average response time to requests and solutions to incidents with such service by Russian companies in practice turns out to be even less than the direct representative office of the vendor previously had. Such experience shows the level of readiness of the Russian IT market to provide professional service for products of departed Western vendors.