Telefónica has partnered with Huawei to build a large scale virtual Evolved Packet Core (vEPC), a framework for providing converged voice and data on 4G Long-Term Evolution (LTE) networks, in Latin America and Europe. The vEPC network will cover eleven countries in Latin America: Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, México, Colombia, Peru, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala; and two in Europe: Germany and Spain.
Telefónica and Huawei have been jointly working and testing Huawei’s vEPC solution, CloudEPC for its performance, in Telefónica’s NFV (Network Function Virtualization) Reference Lab in Madrid.
Network evolution has to cope with traffic growth and Telefónica is facing the challenge using virtualization technologies in order to gain flexibility to adapt to the changing environment while working on optimization and achieving efficiencies. Besides serving the capacity demand, vEPC allows serving diverse use cases that include traditional customer-centric services, IoT/M2M, MVNO, private LTE, and Mobile-Edge Computing.
The companies are also are currently testing the onboarding of the vEPC solution over Telefónica´s UNICA infra cloud platform that will allow full automatization of the vEPC deployments and life cycle management within Telefónica networks.
Javier Gavilan, Planning and Technology Director and Global CTO at Telefornica
This large scale vEPC network deployment is a further step within the Telefónica UNICA virtualization program where a smooth migration to UNICA infra cloud capabilities will be reached following extensive test in Telefónica LAB. These results provide the confidence needed to continue with the adoption and deployment of virtualized solutions and to enable the transformation to software-driven networking.
Michael Ma, President of Cloud Core Network, Huawei
This CloudEPC network build out represents a significant step forward in Telefónica’s cloud transformation roadmap and reinforces our long standing partnership as main EPC provider to Telefónica. We are delighted Telefónica has entrusted Huawei the cloudification of such critical network function, which further strengthens the cooperation within Telefónica UNICA program.
