Altice, a multinational cable, fiber, telecommunications, content and media company with 50 million customers spanning Western Europe, the United States, Israel, and the Overseas Territories, is collaborating with Cisco on a long-term project to build a holistic network function virtualization (NFV) platform.
SFR, Altice's French subsidiary, has been leading this transformation of the mobile packet core infrastructure with an NFV platform architected to support multiple vendors. Co-engineered by Cisco and Red Hat, the solution is based on Red Hat OpenStack Platform, in combination with Cisco networking, virtualization and data center compute solutions.
SFR has an aggressive roadmap in place for 2017 to virtualize additional mobile services, utilizing its Cisco-based SDN/NFV core platform. With 50 percent of the mobile traffic already running on its virtualized platform and 80 percent planned by end of 2017, SFR is well under way in executing on its strategy.
The successful SFR implementation gives Altice the justification to consider similar virtualization deployments throughout its operating companies. This transition can also help Altice converge all mobile packet core services spanning 2G-4G networks into a single virtualized solution, and prepare a smooth transition toward 5G.
Philippe Le May, CTO, SFR, Altice Group
We are focused on innovating faster and taking bold leaps to transform our network operations, providing our customers with experiences beyond mobile that no one else can match.
Yves Padrines, VP, Global Service Provider EMEAR, Cisco
Our strategy is to enable our customers' success at growing both profits and revenues by connecting new services and virtualized applications to networks and clouds. Altice is wholly focused on innovation and transforming its architecture to evolve and support 5G services -- and is already looking ahead to the next phase of virtualizing the evolved packet core.
