Onati brings SD-WAN to the businesses of Tahiti

Competition among the three network operators serving French Polynesia was rising.

Onati, a part of the country’s post, telecommunications, and banking organization, set out to make its communications services more appealing while increasing operational efficiency. Beyond enterprise services like MPLS, Onati offers mobile, television, and fiber Internet under the brand name Vini, a friendly local bird.

“The SD-WAN service project was important to improve the services we offer our professional customers,” says Tehina Thuret, CTO of Onati. “We wanted to deploy SD-WAN services automatically, with no human resources, to optimize our costs.” 

Onati sees a major opportunity to migrate customers from MPLS to SD-WAN for more flexible, application-aware connectivity, bringing fast, reliable connectivity even to businesses on faraway islands.

Geographically, French Polynesia is as large as Europe, and Onati service technicians may have to take a boat or a plane to deploy services to a sparsely populated island to turn up Internet services—or fix an issue. But with automated provisioning and troubleshooting, Onati can quickly and easily deliver SD-WAN services anywhere.

“We estimate that we can deploy services 50% faster than with a traditional router-based solution,” says Thuret.

SD-WAN also allows customers to aggregate multiple different access methods, including fiber, copper, or satellite, to assure an optimal user experience even if one link is disrupted or experiences congested. “If an island loses a fiber or another kind of access link, the backup link can automatically take over,” he says.