Velcom, the second largest mobile operator in Belarus and a 100% daughter company of Telekom Austria Group, in partnership with ZTE, has completed what it claims as the 'worldwide first commercial fully virtualized core network'.
All legacy core network components – like HLR/HSS, EPC, MSC, PCRF – were migrated to a fully virtualized platform on OpenStack based NFV and standard NFV/COTS hardware. The Operator claims that the project team of velcom and ZTE delivered the ambitious project within nine months from contract signature to full deployment.
By transforming and virtualizing its core network into "vCore", velcom said it managed to abolish its legacy silo-based network and significantly cut service running costs, while at the same time ensuring higher flexibility, feature richness and reliability for velcom's customers of voice and packet services. Velcom implemented ZTE's OpenStack based TECS software (Tulip Elastic Cloud System), which combines virtualization and cloud infrastructure management for computing, storage and network resources.
As the system is convergent with NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) and ready for SDN (Software Defined Networking), it centralizes technical processes and therefore cuts costs, allowing velcom to regain flexibility through easy configuration of new services and improving the security as well as reliability level, said Velcom.
Sascha Zabransky, Director Technology, Telekom Austria Group
With this major step towards the next generation network architecture we are able to significantly reduce our OPEX spending, benefit on massive economies of scale for further growth and provide highest flexibility and service value to our customers on the way towards a fully cloud-based network architecture.
Christian Laque, CTO of Velcom
By merging our joint expertise, we were able to ensure a fast implementation of one of the most advanced core network architecture as well as the migration of 100% of our subscribers in a very short time period.
