Telefónica announced today its cooperation with Huawei in virtual enviroments. The two companies are building a large scale virtual Evolved Packet Core (vEPC), a framework for providing converged voice and data on 4G Long-Term Evolution (LTE) networks, in Latin America and Europe. This vEPC network will cover eleven countries in Latin America: Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, México, Colombia, Peru, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala; and two in Europe: Germany and Spain.
Network evolution has to cope with traffic growth and Telefónica is facing the challenge using virtualization technologies in order to gain flexibility to adapt to the changing environment while working on optimization and achieving efficiencies. Huawei’s vEPC solution, named CloudEPC, enables to build agile networks that quickly scale to match the performance demands of new services, reduce production costs, support faster service rollout, and dynamically allocate virtual resources while providing carrier-grade availability, security and reliability and enabling seamless integration with Telefónica's legacy networks. As a result, vEPC allows serving diverse use cases that include traditional customer-centric services, IoT/M2M, MVNO, private LTE, and Mobile-Edge Computing. Huawei vEPC maintains the same features as its existing physical version, SingleEPC, inheriting the long-term experience and the advantages of its leadership in communications technology.
Telefónica and Huawei have been jointly working and testing Huawei CloudEPC performance, in Telefónica’s NFV (Network Function Virtualization) Reference Lab in Madrid. During the test, Huawei CloudEPC showed one of the best performances in both data and signaling planes by good cloud-formation architecture and by using EPA (Enhanced Platform Awareness) technologies. That achievement was a joint effort by both companies within the Telefónica NFV Reference Lab framework. Telefónica and Huawei are currently testing the onboarding of the CloudEPC solution over Telefónica´s UNICA infra cloud platform that will allow full automatization of the vEPC deployments and life cycle management within Telefónica networks.
“Telefónica has been actively working for some time in the evolution of network virtualization technologies. Huawei is a reliable EPC vendor, and a strategic partner of Telefónica collaborating in many NFV areas. This large scale vEPC network deployment is a further step within the Telefónica UNICA virtualization program where a smooth migration to UNICA infra cloud capabilities will be reached following extensive test in Telefónica LAB. These results provide the confidence needed to continue with the adoption and deployment of virtualized solutions and to enable the transformation to software-driven networking," said Javier Gavilán, Planning and Technology Director at Telefonica, Global CTO.
“Huawei is leading the All Cloud strategy for operators´ business success. This CloudEPC network build out represents a significant step forward in Telefónica’s cloud transformation roadmap and reinforces our long standing partnership as main EPC provider to Telefónica. We are delighted Telefónica has entrusted Huawei the cloudification of such critical network function, which further strengthens the cooperation within Telefónica UNICA program.” said Michael Ma, President of Cloud Core Network at Huawei.