K2 Telecom partners with Nokia to strengthen security and create new revenue streams

K2 Telecom has been a leading B2B and wholesale connectivity provider in Southeast Brazil for more than two decades. Its network spans more than 20,000 km of optical fiber across Brazil's four largest states — Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Minas Gerais, and Espírito Santo — supports approximately 200 points of presence, and connects to every major internet exchange point in the region, including Brazil's largest IXP. Customers range from downstream ISPs and CSPs to enterprises in critical sectors such as oil and gas.

Over recent years, K2 Telecom experienced exponential growth in customer bandwidth and a rapidly expanding customer base. Alongside that growth came a new generation of DDoS attacks — volumetric and application-layer, short and intense, sourced from compromised IoT devices inside the network as well as from peering and transit links outside. Legacy appliance- and DPI-based mitigation approaches could not keep pace. K2 Telecom needed a solution that combined fast, accurate detection; agile, precise mitigation; scalable protection; full automation; and the ability to package DDoS defense as a managed, monetizable service for downstream ISPs and enterprise customers.

DPR Telecomunicações — Nokia's technology and solution partner in Brazil and K2 Telecom's long-standing channel partner, having previously introduced the Nokia 7750 Service Router into the network, proposed Nokia Deepfield Defender as the DDoS security foundation. After extensively testing alternatives, K2 Telecom selected Nokia.

K2 Telecom determined that Nokia Deepfield Defender was the only solution capable of responding to the latest generation of DDoS threats — including botnet-originated DDoS — with the speed and accuracy needed to detect attacks in real time while minimizing the impact on legitimate customer traffic.

K2 Telecom deployed Deepfield Defender in combination with Nokia 7750 SR-1 edge routers, which act as DDoS enforcement points. The combination leverages the inline filtering capability of the Nokia FP routing silicon, so security-related filtering — including DDoS mitigation — runs at line rate on the routers themselves, with no redirection of traffic to external scrubbing centers. The same 7750 SR platform also hosts the Nokia Multi-Access Gateway, which delivers virtualized BNG and CGNAT services as an as-a-service offering to K2's downstream ISP customers.

Deepfield Defender pairs network telemetry with Nokia's patented Deepfield Secure Genome — a continuously updated, cloud-based data feed that tracks the security context of the internet across more than 5 billion IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, more than 30 internet categories, and more than 100 machine-learning classification rules. K2 Telecom also engaged the Nokia Deepfield Emergency Response Team Support (ERTS) service, giving its team direct access to Nokia's DDoS security experts. This is the first Nokia Deepfield Defender deployment in a regional ISP in Latin America.

Carlos Barroso, IP Leader for Latin America at Nokia, said the project is further proof of Nokia's increasing footprint in the Latin America ISP market.

The Nokia solution delivers:

• Inline DDoS mitigation performed directly in the routers, enabled by the leading Nokia FP line of network processors, in real time, inside the operator's own network — no redirection to third-party scrubbing clouds, and no resulting customer-experience disruption
• Terabit-level mitigation capacity with zero-touch, 99.84%-automated protection — proven across more than 6,900 mitigations in the first 30 days, with attacks sourced from over 24 million distinct origins
• New wholesale and managed-security revenue streams — a secure data pipe offering, BNG and CGNAT as-a-service for downstream ISPs, and customer-edge-router monitoring delivered on the Deepfield Defender platform
• 360-degree protection against inbound and outbound DDoS, covering compromised IoT devices on the operator's own network as well as malicious traffic arriving over peering and transit links
• Lower OPEX and stronger operational control — prior third-party scrubbing-center contracts terminated, traffic scrubbed in-network, with FP-based 7750 SR routers delivering security filtering and service delivery on the same platform

Together, these benefits have allowed K2 Telecom to redesign its IP edge and security layer end-to-end, defend its network against bigger and more complex DDoS attacks, and turn network security from a cost center into a competitive differentiator and a new revenue stream. The pattern is increasingly relevant to regional and B2B ISPs across Latin America and other markets where centralized scrubbing-cloud economics no longer fit a growing customer base.