With operational costs rising at a rate of 13% a year, carriers need to simplify their networks while leveraging virtualization and automation technologies to reduce the costs involved in bringing on new customers. What's more, as bandwidth demands increase for video, mobile, and cloud services, network access can't be a bottleneck for the customer experience.

At Cisco, we've now announced new Carrier Ethernet innovations that will extend Cisco's Evolved Programmable Network capabilities to the access with specific focus on automating the provisioning process and reducing operational costs for our carrier customers.

First of all, with virtualization technology we're bringing elasticity to access networks.  By leveragingvirtual machine-based controllers that can dynamically scale up and scale down the number of access devices and resources in real time from cloud-based systems. With Elastic Access, service providers can reduce their operational costs while eliminating physical redundancy across the network.

Next we're adding autonomic operations for unconstrained management of any remote access point.  We are now extending zero-touch network Virtualization or nV provisioning to the furthest endpoints and simplifying operation of access nodes, eliminating multiple set-up, and pre-staging while reducing manual touch points and errors. Autonomic access allows for secure auto discovery, auto-configuration, and uninterrupted management and configuration repair of remote access nodes.  With Autonomic access operators can now simplify and automate provisioning and management for allocating bandwidth-on-the-fly extensibility from the core to the most remote access point. Cisco Autonomic Access to the last mile leads to reducing provisioning steps by more than half than present mode of operations.

Lastly, we are expanding Cisco's Service Provider Access portfolio with several new hardware platforms.

• The Cisco ME 4600 Series incorporates the latest Fiber-to-the-premises or FTTP technologies. It's the industry's highest density Optical Line Terminal providing up to twice the number of GPON ports than the competition, and enables carriers to offer both end-user and wholesale services.

• The Cisco ME 1200 Ethernet Access Device provides low-cost customer-premise equipment to deploy managed business services profitably.  The ME 1200 functions as a low cost Network Interface Demarcation Device, and can be managed using the zero-touch provisioning solutions that are part of the Cisco network Virtualization technology.

• Expanding the Cisco ASR 900 Series with two new form factors -the ASR 902 and ASR 920, both with the same feature set as the Cisco ASR 903, but offering smaller form-factors and lower power consumption.

With these announcements, Cisco is leading the way to deliver the benefits of virtualization, management and SDN-based advances to the last mile.

To learn more about the Elastic Access join us for a live Webcast on June 3, 2014 at 8:00am PDT / 11:00 am EDT titled "Innovations in Access Networks Paving the way to Service Agility." Registration is here.