Belgacom has broadened its relationship with Cisco and purchased additional Cisco Mobility Solution to provide 2G, 3G and 4G/LTE connectivity for Belgacom customers. The Cisco products are the Cisco Serving GPRS Support Node (SGSN) and Cisco Mobility Management Entity (MME), key components of the Cisco® Aggregated Services Router (ASR) 5000 Series.
The Cisco ASR 5000 enables convergence of Belgacom's existing 2G, 3G, 4G/LTE and smallcells mobile Internet services under a single packet core network. Cisco said that its Mobility Management Entity (MME) component is critical to the network function of the 4G evolved packet core (EPC). The Cisco MME resides in the evolved packet control (EPC) control plane and manages session states, authentication, paging, mobility with 3GPP, 2G and 3G nodes, roaming and other management functions.
"The Cisco ASR 5000 Series is a single-packet core platform that allows us to operate multiple technologies ‑ including 2G, 3G, LTE and small cells ‑ in our mobile network. Cisco's elastic architecture also allows us to easily and rapidly scale mobile Internet services, which are a fast growing market in Belgium."
- Wim Bouckenooghe, Head of Core Service Platforms Belgacom
“Cisco is committed to supporting the world's largest mobile operators with multi-dimensional elasticity across network services, signaling, sessions and throughput ‑ part of an elastic, programmable, open architecture that helps operators manage resources between physical and virtual environments. As operators plan new, innovative, advanced mobile Internet services, such as sponsored data, Cisco helps them monetize intelligence traversing their mobile networks.”
- Mike Landolo, vice president and general manager, Mobile Internet Technology Group, Cisco
