Alcatel-Lucent today said it would offer evolved packet core (EPC), IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and radio access network (RAN) – a part of its network functions virtualization (NFV) portfolio — on the cloud.
Mobile operators such as China Mobile, Verizon, etc. will be able to deploy these virtualized mobile network applications to drive scalability and elasticity.
Alcatel-Lucent’s virtualized portfolio includes virtualized Evolved Packet Core (vEPC), virtualized IMS (vIMS) solution and virtualized RAN portfolio.
Telecoms can become more agile, efficient and responsive as they innovate with new service offerings, speed deployments on a massive scale and expand into new markets.
Chris DePuy, vice president at Dell’Oro Group, said recently: “Telecom vendors are beginning to offer NFV based systems, and so new service provider deployments in APAC and EMEA are likely to become the most significant users of NFV.”
Alcatel-Lucent is already working with 20 service providers as they begin to leverage NFV in their networks.
Alcatel-Lucent and China Mobile are co-demonstrating voice and video delivered over a virtualized proof of concept LTE RAN Baseband Unit (BBU) and virtualized evolved packet core (vEPC) on boarded to the cloud by CloudBand 2.0 – the company’s second generation NFV platform, at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
Chihlin I, chief scientist of CMCC Research Institute, said: “Here we are demonstrating how a cloud network environment can help us deliver services faster and better to even greater numbers of people. This will help us meet the explosion in demand for mobile data and allow us to innovate even further with new service offerings.”
NFV enables network automation and efficient use of resources for rapid scaling up and down of services. It will optimize delivery of services such as voice over LTE (VoLTE), Web real time communications (Web RTC), secure mobile communications for enterprises and machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. In addition NFV will cut the time and costs of bringing these and other new services to market.
Marcus Weldon, corporate chief technology officer (CTO) of Alcatel-Lucent said: “Each mobile operator will have different priorities and want to take their own specific path to NFV, based on their business priorities and the state of their network and operations readiness.”
