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Telekom Austria’s Belarus unit migrates legacy network components to OpenStack-based NFV platform, standard hardware.
Telekom Austria’s Belarussian unit Velcom on Wednesday laid claim to the world’s first fully-virtualised core network.
The operator, along with Chinese vendor ZTE, migrated all legacy core network components – including the home location register (HLR), evolved packet core (EPC), mobile switching centre (MSC), and policy and charging rules function (PCRF) – to an OpenStack-based NFV platform, and standard hardware.
"With this major step towards the next-generation network architecture we are able to significantly reduce our opex spending, benefit on massive economies of scale for further growth and provide highest flexibility and service value to our customers on the way towards a fully cloud-based network architecture," said Sascha Zabranksy, director of technology at Telekom Austria.
By merging our joint expertise, we were able to ensure a fast implementation of one of the most advanced core network architecture as well as the migration of 100% of our subscribers in a very short time period," added Christian Laque, CTO of Velcom.
Velcom said it is the first full-service mobile operator with more than 5 million subscribers to migrate 100% of its customer base and all of its legacy systems to a virtual core, and it managed to do it just nine months.
"We are highly pleased about this successful collaboration and proud to support Velcom in offering superior services by using ZTE solutions," said Christian Woschitz, COO of ZTE Austria. "The smart combination of local know-how as well as global resources by ZTE made the success of this flagship project possible."
Telekom Austria said more projects with ZTE are in the pipeline.
