Huawei and China Telecom's Beijing Research Institute have recently completed live network tests of the industry's first Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) based Virtual Customer Premises Equipment (vCPE). The two companies are working towards commercialization of the NFV-based vCPE for the enterprise market, addressing the need to integrate additional services within the same hardware to save costs on additional hardware and operating expenses.
According to Huawei, the vCPE solution cloudifies and simplifies enterprise service functions and virtualizes them on carrier networks, while retaining simple access functions on the enterprise side. The NFV-based vCPE also facilitates enterprises when planning new services and operating a Pay as You Grow business model.
"Through this live network test of vCPE, we have realized the immense benefits of Network Functions Virtualization to carriers. This provides software and hardware support for future development and deployment of integrated Cloud services, helping carriers address challenges from cloud computing and big data."
- Chen Yunqing, Vice President, China Telecom Corporation Limited Beijing Research Institute