Alcatel-Lucent has made the first deployment of the NFV portfolio it revealed at this year’s Mobile World Congress, rolling out its Wireless Cloud Element Radio Network Controller to Saudi operator Mobily.
The vendor said the product would help the Middle Eastern operator to “improve service performance, reliability, scale and operational efficiency”. Mobily was the first operator to launch TD-LTE and has the largest active base of HSPA customers across the Middle East and North Africa.
Alaa Malki, Mobile Network CTO of Mobily, commented: “Our team worked very closely with Alcatel-Lucent to assure adopting the new technologies to maximise the network effecency which is part of Mobily strategy and to use ALU cloud-based control solution.
“We have a very technologically sophisticated customer base and we need to stay at the forefront of technological innovation to provide the level of experience that will keep them satisfied. To that end we have achieved our first goal and we look forward to the improved virtualized RNC performance, reliability and scale.”
Alcatel-Lucent launched its virtualised LTE RAN products in February, holding a proof of concept demonstration with China Mobile at Mobile World Congress.
Amr K. El-Leithy, President of Alcatel-Lucent’s Middle East, Africa, Turkey and Azerbaijan region commented: “This is the first deployment anywhere for the virtual RNC by Alcatel-Lucent and it authoritatively demonstrates that carrier-grade cloud network solutions is a reality.”
According to research from Infonetics, more than half of operators (52 percent) will launch field trials of NFV and SDN products by the end of 2014. More than 90 percent of operators will roll out virtualised products in the longer term.