China Mobile Hong Kong and Huawei announced they have successfully migrated CMHK services to an NFV-based cloud core network for commercial use. The move demonstrates CMHK’s pioneering role among Hong Kong telecom operators in the cloud era as all service indicators met expectations following the migration earlier in the month.
Facing increasingly fierce competition, CMHK is the first mobile operator to cloudify its core network in Hong Kong. CMHK deployed the 3GPP system, providing services for more than 20 network systems such as IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), Evolved Packet Core (EPC), Diameter Routing Agent/ Mobile Number Portability (DRA/MNP), Home Subscriber Server/ Home Location Register (HSS/HLR) and Mobile Switching Center-Server (MSC-S). This network architecture not only helps maximize return on investment and improve operation and maintenance efficiency, but also paves the way to 5G towards the Network 2020 vision.
By the end of 2016, Huawei claims that it will have more than 130 contracts in place worldwide to build NFV networks for commercial use. By 2020, Huawei will continue to assist operators in building cloud networks to maximize return on investment from network infrastructure.
Sean Lee, Director and CEO of CMHK
With our two professional teams in force, it only took half a year to complete the preparation work for the migration and activation for commercial use. The synergy between CMHK and Huawei is expected to ensure our entire cloud networks will be smoothly put into commercial use, bringing better service to our customers.
Wang Yongde, VP of Huawei's Cloud Core Network Product Line
On CMHK's cloud network, network elements in IMS, Packet Switched and Circuit Switched domains are co-deployed. VoLTE (Voice Over LTE), VoWiFi (Voice Over WiFi) and mobile data services are co-operated. Compared to legacy core networks, cloud-core networks are more elastic and robust. CMHK and Huawei are jointly developing new technologies, such as network slicing and edge computing to lead the transformation to cloud networks.
