Pan-Asian operator Pacnet has announced its work with optical infrastructure vendor Infinera to bring network virtualization technologies into the optical layer, utilising software defined networking capabilities. The introduction of SDN into Layer 1 is intended to afford customers requiring high-capacity to access high bandwidth availability on a self-service basis.

The operator announced the work is being done with Infinera, making use of the vendor’s open transport switch (OTS) software platform, a form of SDN, across the optical layer of the Pacnet Enabled Network (PEN).

PEN is a trans-pacific, 100 Gbps submarine network that delivers integrated network and technology solutions to enterprise customers across the Asia region. PEN launched last year, and in late-2013 the operator went public with beta-phase demonstrations showing how SDN and the open-source traffic routing protocol OpenFlow were allowing programmable and real-time allocation of bandwidth across varying parts of the network on an ad hoc basis.

At the time, the announcement of real-world SDN in action was streaks ahead of any other research .or development going on in the telecoms industry.

“In November 2013, we launched the industry’s first fully-automated, SDN-based service delivery platform, Pacnet Enabled Network, on Layer 2 Ethernet. Today, we are excited to continue to lead through innovation by bringing this capability to our optical layer,” said Jim Fagan, president of managed services at Pacnet. “With this deployment, Pacnet can deliver to our customers a true cloud experience to better utilise our unrivalled network assets.”

Utilising SDN capabilities already engrained into PEN, Pacnet customers are able to dynamically request and provision bandwidth through a self-service portal, which is scalable to business needs. So far, the self-service portal has been applicable to Ethernet services on Layer 2 of the network, ranging from 1 Mbps to 10 Gbps.

Infinera claims the contribution of OTS to PEN will allow customers to access self-service capabilities on the network’s optical layer, thus gaining access to far superior allocation of bandwidth, which could, theoretically, boost service speeds by powers of 10 for high-capacity customers. The vendor reckons the service is intended to allow services in increments of N x 100 Gbps in the future.

Michael Howard, principal analyst of carrier networks at IHS-Infonetics Research, reckons the announcement compounds Pacnet position at the very forefront of SDN in telecoms network infrastructure.

“This new service offering highlights how Pacnet continues to lead through innovation, particularly in the area of Software-defined Network services,” he said. “While many providers have been doing SDN lab evaluations or performing SDN proof of concept tests, Pacnet today is delivering the first large-scale, commercially available Transport SDN-enabled service, and it is based on the Infinera Open Transport Switch.”

Telecoms.com’s news coverage is sponsored by NEC.

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T-Mobile Austria has announced that it will be implementing a virtualized charging system solution as part of a wider virtualized BSS strategy. The solution, provided by BSS specialist Openet, will be responsible for creating personalised offers to T-Mobile Austria’s pay-as-you-go, contract, consumer and enterprise subscribers.

According to Openet, the Evolved Charging Solution (ECS) will provide the telco with previously unachievable rating and charging capabilities, which will help T-Mobile manage its existing services, and help deliver new services faster and more efficiently, while also making them more easily monetised.

As is the primary functional benefit of most network virtualization solutions, the vendor also claims its virtualized BSS charging solution will help boost T-Mobile’s business agility, as well as increasing its service availability and reliability.

Niall Norton, the CEO of Openet, reckons T-Mobile will now be able to roll-out a new range of data tariffs this year as a consequence of their partnership.

“Our ECS enables a host of new functionality which provides a rich customer engagement and will enable T-Mobile to rapidly introduce a new advanced data tariff portfolio this year,” he said. “We’re delighted to have successfully fought off some intensive competition to secure T-Mobile Austria’s business.”

The CTO of T-Mobile Austria, Ruediger Koester, is confident the added agility in charging and billing will allow the operator to reinforce its position in the marketplace.

“Their… technically complex solutions will help us to launch differentiating new products in our increasingly competitive marketplace,” he said.

In the last few years, virtualization of carrier network operations has proven to be one of the big talking points in telecoms networking.  The Telecoms.com Intelligence Annual Industry Survey 2015 examined viewpoints on virtualized BSS within the operator community.

Of the 2,000+ respondents who answered, nearly two thirds revealed they either already have or are planning to implement a virtualized BSS solution. At this stage just under half of respondents indicated that implementation of virtualized BSS is at least one year away.

When asked to say what the primary benefit of virtualized BSS would be, speed of deployment and time to market was the clear top answer, garnering 38% of responses, while other benefits such as capex reduction and more differentiated service offerings attracted half the numbers.

This is perhaps consistent with a degree of ambiguity towards the benefits of virtualized solutions over and above a growing consensus that it improves speed and agility.

Verizon has confirmed publicly its plans to develop and implement a software defined networking infrastructure, working alongside Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Ericsson and Nokia Networks, among others.

The US telco giant claims its SDN project will enable a transformation of its existing network, introduce new operational efficiencies and accelerate rapid and flexible service delivery to its customers. In outlining its intended overhaul, Verizon has worked with its aforementioned technology partners to create an SDN network architecture overview document.

The document, the telco claims, has included all interface specifications, reference architectures, plus requirements for both the control layer and forwarding box functions. It appears, as a consequence, Verizon is giving its suppliers very specific requirements for the upgrade, and that each partner is expected to deliver unique and bespoke elements to allow it to achieve the business and technical benefits of an SDN-enabled network.

The business case for implementing SDN has been well documented, such as elastic and scalable network-wide service creation, as well as dynamic resource allocation and network automation. Speaking of the announcement, Verizon’s chief information and technology architect, Roger Gurnani, reckons harnessing SDN will enable Verizon to more agilely deliver new services to its customers.

“Verizon and our key technology partners have always focussed on providing high-performance networks for our customers, and with this SDN architecture we will continue to ensure our network and services meet the needs of our customers, today and in the future,” he said.

Cisco’s chairman and CEO John Chambers, meanwhile, has targeted IoT as the next big growth opportunity for telcos, and says SDN will help enable its monetisation.

“This will become the foundation for innovative, new Verizon services and applications,” he said. “Both companies share a vision to transform the entirety of the network architecture to achieve the speed and operational efficiency required to meet the needs of today, as well as capture the growth opportunities to monetize with the Internet of Everything over the next decade and beyond.”

Verizon’s announcement comes after Telecoms.com’s interview with AT&T at Mobile World Congress earlier this year regarding its Network on Demand infrastructure, where it has actively begun rolling out SDN, NFV and Cloud enabled architectures across the US.

Silicon vendor ARM has unveiled its foray into the world of network functions virtualization (NFV) with the first ARM-based reference platform for the open platform for NFV (OPNFV) group, working closely with Linux specialist vendor Enea. It has also announced a virtualized set-top box solution.

The Cambridge-based Silicon vendor reckons its reference platform will bring previously unachievable and unique value to NFV, claiming it will deliver enhanced processing efficiency, and cross-platform flexibility and choice. VP of embedded marketing at ARM, Charlene Marini, reckons ARM’s entrance signals a kick-start for the NFV movement.

“This is a tremendous leap forward in delivering the NFV vision across a wide range of highly-integrated, workload-optimised ARM-based networking SoCs, available via the common OpenDataPlane (ODP) interface layer,” she said. “This application-ready platform is also the enabling layer for the Intelligence Flexible Cloud framework that will transform network infrastructure over the next decade.”

By working with Enea, which specialises in Linux and open software solutions, the reference platform is intended to support a carrier-grade NFV infrastructure based on a set of VNF applications sitting on top of what ARM describes as the Linux-based building blocks of the platform, i.e. OpenStack, OpenDaylight, Open vSwitch, KVM and ODP.

A number of ARM’s ecosystem partners have said how chuffed they are with the announcement of the reference platform, including AMD, Cavium and Freescale. The director of the OPNFV group, Heather Kirksey, has said the announcement will ultimately end up benefitting users by affording them more choice.

“OPNFV is focused on fostering and strengthening a strong open ecosystem with a wide variety of hardware architectures and environments,” she said. “We are excited for initiatives like the ARM-based reference platform for the OPNFV integration project as it provides more choices for users.”

Meanwhile, ARM’s also been busy elsewhere in the NFV space, by working closely with Applied Micro and Netzyn to define and demonstrate a virtual set-top box reference platform at the NFV World Congress in California. The platform builds upon the work done in the ETSI NFV ISG’s 31st proof of concept, “STB Virtualization in Carrier Networks”.

The intended outcome of the reference platform is to deliver traditional STB/DVR services from the cloud, direct onto users’ televisions and connected devices, foregoing the need for physical equipment in the premises or home. As a consequence, new services can be delivered to end-users more quickly, capex and opex are reduced somewhat and ARPU goes up, ARM claims.

“Pay-TV subscribers care about rich user interfaces (UIs) with responsive performance,” said Karthik Ranjan, ARM’s director of operator relations. “Migrating STB functionality from a standalone box to a remote server talking directly with your TV saves significant cost, energy and materials with no material impact on UI performance. vSTBs will enable operators to increase ARPU through enabling new services on the TV faster while reducing their overall OpEx by utilising cloud computing and low-latency networks.”

Linux Foundation driven open source NFV organisation OPNFV has announced the availability of the first version of its software, which it is calling Arno.

OPNFV was formed just eight months ago by a group of NFV veterans including Chairman Prodip Sen, who was at Verizon and now also heads up NFV at HP. Its aim is to develop an open platform for NFV, which in turn should accelerate the growth of the technology and shorten the time to market for NFV solutions.

As the first release Arno, which commences a sequence of river-based names the second of which will presumably begin with B, is aimed at those exploring NFV deployments. It provides an initial build of the NFV Infrastructure (NFVI) and Virtual Infrastructure Manager (VIM) components of ETSI NFV architecture.

“Only eight months after its formation, OPNFV has met one of its major goals by creating an integrated build, deployment and testing environment that accelerates NFV implementation and interoperability,” said Sen. “With Arno, we now have a solid foundation for testing some of the key resource orchestration and network control components for NFV. This is great a testament to the power of an open source collaborative model and the strength of the NFV ecosystem.”

Here’s a more detailed breakdown of what Arno (which is available to download here) brings to the table, according to the OPNFV announcement:

• Availability of baseline platform: Arno enables continuous integration, automated deployment and testing of components from upstream projects such as Ceph, KVM, OpenDaylight, OpenStack and Open vSwitch. It allows developers and users to automatically install and explore the platform.
• Ability to deploy and test various VNFs: End users and developers can deploy their own or third party VNFs on Arno to test its functionality and performance in various traffic scenarios and use cases.
• Availability of test infrastructure in community-hosted labs: Agile testing plays a crucial role in the OPNFV platform. With Arno, the project is unveiling a community test labs infrastructure where users can test the platform in different environments and on different hardware. This test labs infrastructure enables the platform to be exercised in different NFV scenarios to ensure that the various open source components come together to meet vendor and end user needs.
• Allows automatic continuous integration of specific components: As upstream projects are developed independently they require testing of various OPNFV use cases to ensure seamless integration and interworking within the platform. OPNFV’s automated toolchain allows continuous automatic builds and verification.

The Small Cell Forum industry group has released version 5.1 of its small cell standard, which focuses on the technical and commercial analysis of virtualization options, along with their respective costs and benefits.

As the telecoms industry on the whole increasingly moves towards virtualization it is incumbent on the small cell industry to ensure it keeps pace. Heterogeneous networks (HetNets), that combine macro and small cells to solve coverage and capacity problems are expected to become increasingly common, so the various types of technology need to integrate fully.

“Our operator group met in June 2014 to discuss the impact of virtualization on small cells and the opportunities it could present. What we’re announcing today is the first part of our work in this area,” said Alan Law, Chair of Small Cell Forum.

“We’ve found clear benefits and drivers towards centralization and virtualization of the small cell network. These facilitate the scalability of small cells and enable functions to be moved around depending on loading conditions or availability of compute and transport resources. It’s a really exciting opportunity for the industry and one we will continue to develop as part of our future work.”

In further acknowledgement of the growing importance of HetNets the Forum has even changed its mission statement: “Our mission is to drive the wide-scale adoption of small cells and accelerate the delivery of integrated HetNets.”

“Small Cell Forum has always had a strong focus on interoperability and some of our most influential work to date has been around integrating small cells with not just the macro network, but with service integration, Wi-Fi technologies and enterprise networks,” said Sue Monahan, CEO of Small Cell Forum.

“What we’re seeing now is small cell deployments really ramping up and being used as part of true HetNets, with operators taking advantage of a range of different technologies to deliver the best subscriber experience. Our new roadmap will help operators accelerate the delivery of integrated HetNet deployments, while also leveraging new trends from virtualization through to 5G, M2M and LAA.”

In related news ACG Research says the global small cell market grew 17.5% year-on-year to $134.1 million in Q1, driven by demand for better indoor coverage. “This quarter has yet again seen many indoor deployments, which will continue to grow but are expected to shift to enterprise and public access venues in the coming years. This shift will generate new business opportunities and sources of revenue for MNOs,” said Elias Aravantinos of ACG.

“The ongoing hype around small cells is expected to end by 2016. High data demanding LTE networks and lack of spectrum in the macro layer will force the investment and deployment of a large volume of small cells to boost backhaul, access applications and new services. In the near future the demand of Gbyte levels at the small cell layer toward 5G adoption is expected to boost deployments and significantly affect operators’ spending. Finally, the market is expected to grow at least fivefold by 2019.”

Visit the world’s leading LTE conference and exhibition – LTE World Summit 2015 – in Amsterdam 

Alcatel-Lucent, fresh from signing a billion dollar contract with China’s two leading operators, has laid claim to a live NFV first alongside China Mobile. The kit vendor reckons it has conducted the industry’s first field trial of the virtualized-RAN.

The trial took place at Tisinghua University in Beijing, and Alcatel-Lucent says not only does it help advance the progress of NFV, making its potential edge ever-closer to realisation, but that it could also be construed as a significant building block for both 5G and IoT. Glenn Booth, SVP and GM of the infrastructure vendor’s LTE business, commented to the same effect.

“Alcatel-Lucent is committed to delivering the latest innovations that enable our customers to get the most out of their LTE networks and enable a smooth path to 5G,” he said. “This trial is a prime example of how we are working with customers to develop, test and deploy networks with the highest performance and efficiencies and the lowest cost.”

The trial involved a full campus roll-out of the vRAN solution, trialling use of the tech at the university across 442 hectares and covered nearly 57,000 students and teachers. Indoor and outdoor coverage was demonstrated, and Alcatel-Lucent said it successfully achieved the many characteristics of NFV; flexibility, scalability, cost and energy efficiency.

China Mobile’s chief scientist, Chih-Lin I, reckons technology achievements such as vRAN will have significant effect on the advancement of IoT.

“The vRAN technology will allow us to deliver new efficiencies across our network as our customers’ data demands change and more devices connect to our network,” she said. “We are interested to see how the deployment of Alcatel-Lucent’s vRAN will help us to smoothly evolve our networks to meet these demands.”

Alcatel-Lucent has been pretty active with the operator community in the space recently, having announced its intentions last week to extend its NFV research and testing partnership with Telefónica.

Vodafone is the latest carrier to push ahead with rolling out a voice over LTE (VoLTE) service, with its Italian subsidiary launching the service.

Setting this VoLTE project apart from other operators pursuing the calling technology, however, is the contribution from Huawei to launch the service on a cloud-based IMS core network. Essentially, the service launch is a live demonstration of NFV in action, with it relying on NFV-compliant core network solutions that are interoperable with commercial off the shelf (COTS) infrastructures. In this instance, the IMS and element management system (EMS) are virtualized, managed by the snappily titled “MANO-VNFM” (management and orchestration virtualized network function management).

Huawei reckons this constitutes a world first, and builds upon work conducted during ETSI NFV ISG’s proof of concept trials. ZTE, China Unicom and HP collaborated on developing a VoLTE service based on vEPC (evolved packet core) and vIMS architecture during one such PoC, and it seems Huawei and Vodafone have steamed ahead with a real-world deployment since the project was demonstrated in January.

A statement released by Huawei referenced the NFV partnership with Vodafone in the wider context of converging the ICT and Telecoms worlds. “These innovating are the fruits of partnerships with major operators and join solution optimisation as ongoing processes at Huawei,” it said. “Media plane acceleration, fully automated operation, NFV-based capability exposure, and intelligent network slicing are key areas for NFV consolidation. These future goals are the core of Huawei’s commitment to facilitating cloud transformation for operators.”

Vodafone Italy’s VoLTE rollout, while allegedly being the first to utilise NFV infrastructure, is one of a growing number of European rollouts. Vodafone Germany launched the service in March, while it’s targeting a launch in the UK market at some point this summer. EE and Three, meanwhile, are both looking at a summer 2015 launch date for VoLTE services, as Europe plays catch up with the Far East already leading the way with matured rollouts of the next generation calling technology.

Oracle Communications has released an update to its OSS suite that is designed to give CSPs the agility migrate to virtualized technologies such as NFV when they’re ready.

As you would expect of Oracle, its OSS suite has a large number of components, as well as a number of compatible middleware products. One of the challenges it faces is giving all these products a coherent direction and positioning them for the virtualization era is a good opportunity to do just that.

The emphasis is on simplifying and automating the service design and order fulfilment process, regardless of complexity or the type of network on which it is delivered. Upgrades include built-in support for MEF’s Carrier Ethernet 2.0 services such as E-Line and E-LAN, a single design environment across physical, virtual and hybrid networks and enhancements to both the automation and precision of order processing tools.

“As CSPs continue to standardize and virtualize their networks, agility in service design and automation in service delivery have become major focus areas, which is putting a spotlight on OSS to rapidly launch and efficiently deliver innovative services on an increasingly dynamic network,” said Doug Suriano, GM of Oracle Communications.

“This release of the Oracle Communications OSS suite accelerates design agility, provides support for the latest network technologies, and further simplifies network-based B2B service delivery in practice, supporting our commitment to delivering innovative OSS solutions in an increasingly virtualized communications world.”

Finnish kit vendor Nokia is continuing to promote its nascent cloud offerings for telcos, three months after the launch of its AirFrame datacenter family of products.

AirFrame itself is now available as a containerised solution with a built in power and cooling system and Nokia has also added a software-defined storage module. It is supported by a cloud Care Services package, which is comprised of a service management module for resolving VNF faults, as well as a support package specifically for VMWare deployments.

As well as AirFrame Nokia is promoting its OSS Office for Telco Cloud offering, which seems to be more of a strategic consultation service than a physical product. All of this is stitched together by something Nokia is calling Service Chaining, which is a virtualized environment for the delivery of network services.

“Wherever operators are on their cloud transformation journey, Nokia has the solutions and expertise, all the way from strategy to migration to maintenance,” said Deepak Harie, VP of Systems Integration at Nokia Networks. “Our extensive and open cloud portfolio helps operators in making important decisions towards the most efficient processes, services and solutions across all cloud domains. With Nokia Telco Cloud, operators will be able to achieve maximum benefits from telco and IT convergence.”

Essentially Nokia is trying hard to strengthen its credentials as both a cloud player and a full managed service provider for that sector, something its main competitors have already established. You can expand Nokia’s service chain cloud diagram below.

Spanish telco Telefónica has announced the successful completion of an SDN/NFV proof of concept in partnership with NEC and NetCracker.

The stated purpose of the SDN/NFV is “…to accelerate its strategy to automate operations and provide a new agile WAN on the business market.” The big deal about this PoC is that it covers the whole project, rather than just component parts.

One aspect of this was the creation of a virtualized VPN (a virtualized virtual private network?), which was in turn delivered over virtual customer premise equipment. That’s a lot of virtualization. NEC/NetCracker contributed the orchestration stack as well as several virtual network functions including a virtual SSL termination gateway and virtual firewall.

“The rising complexity of the WAN Network is a significant drain on our time-to-market KPIs,” said Eduardo Guardincerri, Service Development & Planning Director at Telefónica Business Solutions. “That is the primary reason to invest in Proofs of Concept, to address this important challenge.”

“Given the increasing demand for virtualized solutions, we are excited to work with Telefónica and demonstrate the in-depth capabilities of our innovative SDN/NFV solutions,” said Frank DeTraglia, Chief Customer Officer at NetCracker. “We are pleased with the results of this PoC and look forward to expanding our relationship with Telefónica as the market and demand for virtualized technologies grow.”

Kit vendors Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent are to use Broadband World Forum in London’s Excel Centre to demonstrate the practicalities of SDN and virtualized functions.

Ericsson will exemplify, in a series of demonstrations and interactive exercises, how the virtualization of end-to-end network infrastructure will create the right foundation for Wi-Fi Calling. Meanwhile, at the same show, Alcatel-Lucent will set out to demystify concepts like Universal TWDM (time and wavelength division multiplexing), G.fast, Vplus, Gigabit home systems and end-to-end services.

Their joint mission is to bring the abstracts behind NFV to life for an audience of both technical and commercial buyers. As virtualized networks become a commercial reality, it will become increasingly important to popularise the concept, according to Ben Agnew, the director of the Broadband World Forum: “The Proof of Concept zone will be bigger than ever before,” said Agnew. Though the virtualization of telecoms is inevitable, work needs to be done to make it easier to respond to the demands of interoperability, the technical challenges operators face and the dynamic needs of traffic and services, according to Agnew.

As cloud computing and telecoms merge, the event will set out to show the more technically minded the practicalities of getting the most out of NFV, while commercial staff will benefit from a roadmap for mainstream adoption, according to Håkan Djuphammar, head of technology at Ericsson’s Business Unit for Cloud & IP. The goal is to accelerate the use of real, deployable virtualization systems, he argues. “The Ericsson demo shows how NFV opens up new deployment options, since NFV adds scalability and geographical distribution of functionality,” said Djuphammar.

In September Ericsson and mobile telco Entel Chile demonstrated Latin America’s first data transmission over combined 2600 MHz and 700 MHz spectrum bands in a commercial network. The trial proved that over-the-air LTE-Advanced Carrier Aggregation can run at 250Mbps.

“Mobile broadband is opening up a world of opportunities,” said Nicolas Brancoli, VP of Ericsson Latin America. Ericsson claims forty per cent of the world’s mobile traffic now runs over Ericsson equipment.

Visit the world’s leading conference and exhibition focused on fixed mobile convergence – Broadband World Forum 2015 – in London on 20-22 October.

AT&T is working with Cisco and Brocade, in separate joint development efforts to create more services with virtualization technologies. The aim is to enable faster installations and to make fuller use of the potential of the equipment on customer premises, it says.

AT&T says it is working with Cisco, which has 100 visualization offerings, to help it to extend the reach of its Network on Demand platform using software defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) techniques. The software within existing customer premise equipment (CPE) still has massive potential that can be realised with Cisco’s software, according to Cisco’s chief development officer Pankaj Patel. “Cisco’s portfolio of virtualized network functions with AT&T’s could deliver on the promise of virtualization,” said Patel.

Meanwhile, Brocade has announced that joint visualization developments with AT&T have created a way to make routing functions run in the cloud. AT&T is remaining tight lipped about details of potential new products and services emerging from its partnerships.

“We’re working with Brocade to enhance our Managed Internet Service on Demand, so customers don’t need a router at their location. With the support of their technology, customers will experience faster installations and more dynamic control of their network service,” said Roman Pacewicz, senior VP for AT&T’s Marketing and Global Strategy.

VMware has announced new programmes and functions to make it quicker and easier for mobile telcos to boost their networks with network functions visualization (NFV) technology.

Among the initiatives for the V Cloud platform are a new VMware Ready for NFV accreditation programme and new carrier-grade services to be delivered by the vendor and its partners. These offerings and partnerships were unveiled at VMworld 2015 Europe in Barcelona.

The vCloud NFV combines core visualization and management components in order to speed up NFV deployment, said the vendor. It achieves this by giving the CSPs a unified, multi-vendor and multi-function platform to supports any application through all stages of cloud evolution. The vendor claims it supports 40 virtual network functions from 30 virtualized network functions (VNF) vendors, which will help telco staff to use their existing VMware skills and operational experience.

VMware Virtual SAN is to be integrated into the VMware stack to support the mobile core and IP multi-media system (IMS) functions in order to boost performance. VMware NSX will provide L2/L3 networking features in software to help CSPs benefit from server virtualization at their data centres, the vendor claims.

VMware has also promised CSPs more openness and choice in cloud management, with flexible options for virtual infrastructure management (VIM) through its vCloud Director-SP and Integrated OpenStack features. These, it says, will enable CSPs to self-configure their NFV in order to fine tune applications and prevent bottlenecks.

Other features include load-balancing as a service (LBaaS), an unexplained feature called the Ceilometer and a feature called Heat Auto Scaling, all of which contribute to a more flexible system of management. Another feature, Service Assurance with Day 2 and Ongoing Operations, could give CSPs fully integrated and unified operations tools, according to VMWare.

Meanwhile, the carrier-grade support programme aims to help CSPs reduce the risk of performance degradation and outages. The support will be delivered by VMWare and its partners.

“We double down on our efforts to help CSPs create a consistent infrastructure,” said Shekar Ayyar, general manager of the Telco NFV Group at VMware.

Colt has announced a new offering which claims to help enterprises and wholesale operators get the full benefits of virtualization at reduced cost and complexity.

The new Colt DCNet as-a-service has simplified the process of using virtualization for the data centre operators of wholesale customers and enterprises, says Colt. Colts own research says 77% of IT leaders think pre-emptive support is more important than ongoing support from service providers, so it will make it easier for them to roll out services to their own clients.

The DCNet will help clients make full use of software defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) without having to invest in experts in these disciplines. With SDN and NFV skills rare, skilled operators are expensive to source and DCNet will remove the cost and the complexity, according to Colt.

The service will make on-demand data centre interconnect services available across Europe through a self-service portal. Colt says it will improve integration with cloud services, reduce lead times and builds on flexible commercial models while delivering new improved SLAs.

The user in the data centre will become more effective by dint of being given the power to serve themselves when ordering resources, provisioning services for clients and adapting them to suit their client’s circumstances, according to Colt.

Next year, Colt will use the service to create elasticity of demand between data centres, customer sites and cloud service providers, by creating connections that can adjust to usage patterns. The system will provide application programming interfaces (APIs) to make it easier for operator clients to provide services across third-party networks.

While SDN creates a major business model change for the telecoms industry, companies will need help in transforming the way service providers interact with customers, according to Carl Grivner, EVP of network services at Colt. Colt’s Novitas programme aims to help customers to consume services in a way that is right for them and to help them come to grips with the technology. “Our vision is to be the cloud access provider for the business sector, enabling customers to build and operate their network from anywhere,” said Grivner.

A selection of wholesale and enterprise customers in the finance and media verticals will be trying out the new options in November. DCNet’s self-service portal is initially available for data centre interconnect services in 57 third party data centres in London, Paris and Frankfurt. It will be extended to 150 data centres across Europe as well as Asia Pacific in early 2016.

ENDS

Base stations could get smaller, cheaper and more powerful if a new virtualization project reaches fruition in 2016.

Kit maker NEC and Intel Corporation are to jointly develop a Cloud-Radio Access Network (Cloud-RAN) that can virtualize the functions of mobile base stations. The first joint proof of concept trial of Cloud-RAN will run in early 2016.

The partners say they aim to virtualize two major components of the next mobile base station, the Digital Unit (DU) and the Radio Unit (RU), which respectively handle data processing and the sending and receiving of radio waves. The new Cloud-RAN system will separate the DU functions from mobile base stations so they can be run on general-purpose Intel servers with multi-core processors. This means DU functions can be centralised which in turn allows for multiple radio units to be centrally controlled from one general-purpose server.

This re-engineering of base stations boosts their communication performance as they have more precise control of radio interference between the radio units. By consolidating the servers it also cuts the power and space consumption. The upshot of Cloud-RAN should be more powerful base stations that are cheaper to run, according to NEC. Virtualization has been a work in progress for a long time at NEC, said Nozomu Watanabe, General Manager for NEC’s Mobile Radio Access Network Division.

“We have been working with Intel on the virtualization of mobile core networks and customer premises equipment and are pleased to extend our collaboration in Network Functions Virtualization to mobile base stations,” said Watanabe.

NEC is to strengthen its relationship with Intel for the advancement of NFV as the core technology supporting 5G said Watanabe. NEC contributes to SDN and NFV related standards bodies the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), OpenDaylight, ETSI NFV, and Open Platform for NEV (OPNFV). It also the NEC SDN Partner Space programme to promote the development and use of network virtualization technologies.

Irish BSS company Openet will be making its VNF Lifecycle Manager software available for free from March 2016 in a bid to promote openness and standardization of NFV.

While there are already initiatives in place designed to encourage a community approach to NFV and thus avoid the perils of competing proprietary solutions, such as OPNFV, Opennet clearly thinks there’s more to be done. The release of a ‘community edition’ of Openet VNF Lifecycle Manager is, according to Openet, intended to “enable the adoption of vendor-interchangeable and interoperable Virtual Network Functions and help operators to realise the benefits that open NFV can deliver.”

“NFV needs to be open, but in reality we see some VNF vendors insisting on delivering a bespoke VNF Manager, citing specific performance or complexity issues,” said Michael O’Sullivan, GVP Engineering for Openet. “The resulting integration effort not only demands that operators provide complex VNF on-boarding processes, but also introduces the danger of vendor lock-in. This will not help with the adoption of NFV, and will impact the flexibility and overall competitiveness of operators.

“In order to become more agile telecoms operators need NFV to be fully open. By making its software available free of charge on a community model, Openet is helping to remove a major pain point in managing diverse VNFs. This will accelerate cost effective NFV ecosystem build-outs and bring new services and products online faster and in a more robust manner. We will provide this software free of charge to operators, system integrators and VNF vendors. It’s important that all companies involved in the development and implementation of an open and interoperable ecosystem work together to enable NFV to advance.”

Openet is, of course, a commercial enterprise so it presumably anticipates at least an indirect benefit to itself from this move, even if it’s only by accelerating the adoption of NFV. But this does set an interesting precedent for companies to back up their rhetoric with material action and it will be interesting to see if others follow suit.

The Linux Foundation-inspired OPNFV Project has taken a new step closer to its ideal of network liberalisation with a new release of its software, reports BCN.

Network Function Virtualisation (NFV), the telecoms industry’s answer to the Stock Market’s Big Bang, aims to open the market for creating software that runs the multitude of functions within any network. The OPNFV Project aims to create a carrier-grade, integrated, open source platform that uses NFV to create telecoms networks that are infinitely more flexible and adaptable than the traditional proprietary systems that locked the software within the rigid backbone of telecoms hardware.

The Project has announced the availability of new improved version of its original offering, code-named Arno, which Telecoms.com reported on in June 2015. The new release, Brahmaputra, offers a more comprehensive standard of tools for testing NFV functionality and use cases. Brahmaputra is OPNFV’s first full experience with a massively parallel simultaneous release process and helps developers to collaborate with upstream communities. By encouraging group collaboration on feature development and addressing multiple technology components across the ecosystem, the Project aims to improve the stability, performance and automation of the system, and to consolidate its features.

The extent of collaboration is ambitious, since OPNFV aims to bring together at least 165 developers from network operators, solution providers and vendors. The focus of their joint efforts will be on integration, deployment and the testing of upstream components to meet NFV’s needs. During the integration process to create the Brahmaputra release, code was contributed by programme writers in the OpenStack, OpenDaylight, OpenContrail ONOS and ETSI developer communities. Meanwhile, there were 30 different projects accepted which created new powers, specifications and community resources to the system.

Among the improvements are Layer 3 VPN instantiation and configuration, initial support for IPv6 deployment and testing in IPv6 environments, better fault detection and recovery, performance boosts through data plane acceleration and much fuller infrastructure testing.

“The strength of any open source project depends on the community developing it,” said OPNFV director Heather Kirksey, “with an entire industry involved in the development of NFV, we’re seeing more collaboration and the strides we made in Brahmaputra create a framework for even more developers to come together.”

Cisco has launched a new system which aims to virtualize every conceivable network function possible for clients and take them through the painful process of digital transformation.

The networking vendor has announced its new Digital Network Architecture (DNA), which it describes as an open, software driven framework. The DNA will complement and extend the policies of its data centre based Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) technology throughout the entire network, Cisco says.

Whereas ACI software defined the network, DNA will help enterprises to define everything from the campus to the branch, whether the network is wired or wireless, at the core or at the edge, says Cisco. DNA will sit within the Cisco ONE Software family, in order to simplify software licensing and help protect investments by providing continuity.

The Cisco DNA is built on five guiding principles, which can be summarized as virtualize everything, automate management, analyse everything everywhere, one policy for the entire network and keep every layer of networking as open and extensible as possible.

The mission to virtualizing everything that can be possibly software defined will maximise the options for telcos and all enterprises. This gives the clients the choice to run any service anywhere, independent of the underlying platform, be it physical or virtual, on premise or in the cloud, says Cisco. Yesterday Cisco announced the acquisition of Leaba Semiconductor, which specializes in networking semi-conductors which could play a central role in the virtualization of networking functions and maximise the possibilities for embedding virtualized functions.

Automating network management will maximise the speed and efficiency of the virtualized functions of an enterprise, but this may be regulated by the third important DNA principle, the need to have pervasive analytics. Analytics will provide the checks and balances needed to keep the network and IT infrastructure meeting its performance potential. Similarly, a virtualized network can only be an efficient cloud if service management from the cloud can unify policy and orchestration across the network. On Monday BCN reported how Cisco plans to buy cloud orchestration specialist CliQr.

The key to preventing network sclerosis is keeping everything open and accessible, which is why Cisco’s fifth guiding principle for DNA is to keep everything open, extensible and programmable at every layer, so that Cisco and third party technology can be integrated.

On the back of disappointing Q1 sales, Nokia Networks has announced the launch of the NetAct Cloud virtualized OSS solution for network management.

The cloud-based upgrade to NetAct, Nokia claims, makes network management more robust, flexible and scalable while improving performance in virtual and hybrid environments.

As is the norm for virtualized platforms performing network management or function deployment, Nokia says NetAct’s virtualized instance enables the easy, visualised management of radio, core and transport networks. Because it is virtual it benefits from near-zero downtime for upgrades, Nokia reckons.

Alongside the network management system, NetAct also comes with an add-on called Fast Pass, which appears to harness the traditional benefits of NFV so operators can deploy new network functions faster. Because they are both software-only, NetAct Cloud and Fast Pass combined will be deployable on the same data centre platforms as other IT and telco systems to boost cost efficiency and agility in rolling out new services.

The ultimate aim, of course, is to smooth the path to 5G, according to Nokia.

“NetAct Cloud was built with an evolution towards 5G in mind,” said Applications and Analytics President at Nokia, Bhaskar Gorti. “We added capabilities to deploy network features faster and work smoothly in cloud environments. With these enhancements, Nokia is well equipped to help our more than 500 NetAct customers safeguard their network management investment while preparing their networks for the future.”

In other Nokia news, the vendor announced it will be rolling out LTE-A in Saudi Arabian city of Jeddah. Working with Zain KSA, Nokia will be deploying three component carrier aggregation and reckons it’ll be able to deliver download speeds (theoretical) of 187.5Mbps. Nokia has been making a concerted cloud play over the past year, with a variety of their traditionally hardware-based products in the network portfolio being ported over to cloud platforms or being augmented with additional cloud-based functionality. These include, but are not limited to, cognitive cloud platform AVA, AirFrame, Radio Cloud and more.

“With this new launch, we can help to fulfil these demands by providing ultra-user experience through higher data throughput levels and optimum network performance,” said CTO of Zain KSA Sultan AlDeghaither. “Moreover, this technology will allow us to move toward our goal of transforming Jeddah into a role model for smart and digitally connected cities across the world, and enrich the experience of Zain customers in Saudi Arabia.”