Vodafone and Telecom Italia (TIM) are speeding up their virtualisation plans through new vendor deals agreed at Mobile World Congress.
Vodafone Group is working with NEC/Netcracker to support its shift towards becoming a cloud provider.
The operator will deploy the vendor’s Hybrid Operations Management platform to orchestrate and manage operational services, reducing time to market.
In addition, Vodafone Ziggo, its joint venture in the Netherlands with Liberty Global, announced it has signed a multi-year agreement with NETSCOUT for the vendor to deliver end-to-end visibility and analytics.
The operator said the solution would support its NFV transformation and allow it to have real-time input into its network performance.
Vodafone is currently undertaking a company-wide virtualisation project called OCEAN, which aims to simplify and speed up the delivery of services to customers. It signed up Huawei to deploy its FusionSphere platform in December.
Meanwhile, TIM is using JMA Wireless’s XRAN Adaptive Baseband platform, a 100 percent software-based virtualised RAN (vRAN) platform which runs on off-the-shelf servers.
Optimised for Intel Xeon processors, it includes features such as increasing or reducing capacity based on the number of connected mobile devices and can be managed using web-based interfaces. It can be deployed anywhere in the network and complies with 3GPP standards, including for carrier aggregation capabilities, IoT connectivity and support for various spectrum bands.
The Italian operator is using the platform in a live deployment to support its network in a dense urban environment.
Read more from MWC: Cisco launches 5G Now, looks to spur vRAN adoption