Telenor and Cisco on Tuesday announced the signing of the third iteration of the Joint Purpose Agreement between the companies to help telcos cross major milestones spanning security, 5G, cloud, Open vRAN, B2B expansion and distributed cloud.
The companies are continuing the exploration of new 5G architectures and have started an Open vRAN trial at Telenor headquarters in Norway to further investigate using a virtualized, open infrastructure to improve cost efficiency for service rollouts.
The joint venture, WG2 which was formed in 2017 offers a carrier grade, cloud-native mobile core solution that enables rapid service innovation for mobile network operators (MNOs), mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) and enterprises. Using open APIs and cross-network interoperability, WG2 radically transforms the ability of mobile operators to innovate quickly.
WG2 will now be included in Cisco’s General Price List (GPL) and in Cisco’s DevNet program, providing global sales coverage and faster integration of new services with Cisco products, platforms and APIs.
Sigve Brekke, President and CEO, Telenor
Our partnership in WG2 builds towards a future where programmable networks are the key to creating value for 5G, IoT and private networks. Ongoing developments in our agreement with Cisco continue to be forward leaning, addressing the most innovative and in-demand transformation topics in our industry.
Chuck Robbins, Chairman and CEO, Cisco
We continue to evolve WG2 to give operators the opportunity to reduce time to market and speed time to revenue with IoT and managed services for the enterprise, powered by the cloud and 5G.