Huawei has signed a five year managed services agreement with Telefónica UK to plan and manage the operator's mobile core network.
The agreement sees 56 permanent roles — those who currently plan and build Telefónica UK’s core network — transfer to Huawei. A further 62 contractor roles will also transfer alongside the permanent employees.
A Huawei spokesperson told Mobile Europe, "The team that's transferring is much more about the monitoring and planning and design of the core network, rather than operations."
As such, it seems likely that the Huawei team will now plan and manage Telefonica UK's transition to Evolved Packet Core elements that will support the introduction and management of IP services over O2's LTE network.
But the spokesperson said the deal was not strategically aligned to winning infrastructure deals – instead it would give Huawei the capability to expand its managed networks business using the skills and experience of the people it has transferred over from Telefonica.
"For us this is about building our capability as a managed service business in the UK. People assume that we would win this deal in a network or part of the network where we have kit deployed, but we have no kit in this network," the spokesperson said.
A Telefonica spokesperson confirmed that the deal was around the planning and implementation of core elements such as RNCs and switching centres. The operator has an existing managed services deal with BT for some of its backhaul network.
There is no disclosed value of the contract, but Mobile Europe understands that the Telefonica jobs will not be "offshored".