Alcatel-Lucent has launched its latest NFV project, teaming up with Korea Telecom to help drive its shift to virtualisation.
The companies have signed a technical collaboration agreement to help KT develop its so-called ultrafast Giga Network. The Korean operator said it hopes that by deploying NFV products, its new virtualised architecture would “increase efficiency, lower costs and increase cloud products”.
Both companies will work together to build an NFV proof of concept that will include the vendor’s virtualised evolved packet core system, its CloudBand NFV platform to manage the virtualised environment and the Nuage Networks virtualised services platform, which will automate the operator’s network by using software defined networking.
Chi Il Yoo, Head of Alcatel-Lucent Korea, commented: “Alcatel-Lucent and KT share a vision of the strategic importance of virtualisation and cloud infrastructure and service formation. We look forward to helping KT transition its EPC network functions to operate in an NFV/SDN environment.
“Combining vEPC, CloudBand and Nuage Networks VSP for SDN provides an innovative architectural model to answer the demand for next generation application workloads and to optimise CAPEX and OPEX for delivering KT’s mobile broadband services.”
HongBeom Jeon, Head of Technology Infra Laboratory Center at KT, said he expects the collaboration will help it to create converged services “for [the] Gigatopia era” and develop “new revenue generation models”.
The collaboration is the second virtualised project that Alcatel-Lucent has launched in Asia during the past week. It is building a new research centre in Tokyo to help with the building of new ultra-broadband and cloud-based solutions.
In addition, the vendor is working with Japanese operator NTT DOCOMO on NFV trials alongside rivals including Cisco and NEC.
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