by
N. Peter Kramer
The two companies are building 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. This vEPC network will cover eleven countries in Latin America: Argentina, Brazil, Columbia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru and Uruguay; and two in Europe: Germany and Spain.
Network evolution has to cope with traffic growth and Telefónica is facing the challenge using virtualisation technologies in order to gain flexibility to adept to the changing environment while working on optimisation and achieving efficiencies.
Huawei’s vEPC solution, named CloudEPC, enables to build agile networks that quickly scale to match the performance demands of new services, reduce production costs, support faster service rollout, and dynamically allocate virtual resources while providing carrier-grade availability, security and reliability and enabling seamless integration with Telefónica’s legacy networks. As a result, vEPC allows serving diverse use cases that include traditional customer-centric services, IoT/M2M, MVNO, private LTE, and Mobile-Edge Computing. Huawei vEPC maintains the same features as its existing physical version, SingleEPC, inheriting the long-term experience and the advantages of its leadership in communications technology.
Telefónica and Huawei have been jointly working and testing Huawei CloudEPC performance, in Telefónica’s NFV (Network Function Virtualisation) Reference Lab in Madrid. During the test, Huawei CloudEPC showed one of the best performances in both data and signalling planes by good cloud-formation architecture and by using EPA (Enhanced Platform Awareness) technologies.
That achievement was a joint effort by both companies within the Telefónica NFV Reference Lab framework. Telefónica and Huawei are currently testing the onboarding of the CloudEPC solution over the Telefónica UNICA infra cloud platform that will allow full automatisation of the vEPC deployments and life cycle management within Telefónica networks.
