Vodafone finishes European network virtual infrastructure rollout

Vodafone Group on Tuesday announced that it has completed its rollout of NVI throughout its entire European footprint, spanning 21 countries.

 

Having a single, unified digital architecture across its networks will allow Vodafone to design, build, and introduce new software features around 40% faster than before, as well as significantly increasing network speed and efficiency. 

 

Software specialist VMware has been the key partner in this process, with their cloud infrastructure allowing voice core, data core and service platforms on over 900 virtual network functions. This infrastructure is currently deployed at 57 of Vodafone’s European sites, as well as a further 25 across Africa, Asia, and Oceania. 

 

Naturally, this process also helps to reduce network operating costs for the carriers, partially through limiting the amount of manual oversight required to run the network.

 

“Vodafone wants to be the industry’s leading digital telco and we are pleased with the progress made to introduce modern cloud-based technology and automation,” said Vodafone CTO Johan Wibergh. “Working with VMware, we have improved the speed and efficiency with which we can support customers and estimate that the cost of our core network functions has been reduced by 50%.”

 

More and more operators are accelerating their network virtualisation processes, not least to boost their new 5G networks. Now, in the face of the coronavirus pandemic that is stretching networks as people work from home en masse, the increased speed and efficiency gained from virtual infrastructure seems more important than ever.