Chinese network vendor Huawei is one of Telefónica's key partners in Project Unica. MCI spoke to Ken Wang, president of global marketing and solutions for Huawei's Carrier Network business group about the firm's involvement in Unica and its wider perspective on Network Functions Virtualization.
During the interview, Ken Wang told MCI his understanding of NFV. He said, "Network Functions Virtualization is one of the most important trends for future networks. It can significantly improve network flexibility, create a more open and creative environment for the industry, and help mobile operators address the most pressing challenges in their businesses.
The first of these is network flexibility and the adaptability of services. The mobile internet now offers a vast range of innovative applications and services but it requires that the underlying networks quickly and seamlessly adapt to the evolving upper-layer services.
At the same time carrier networks are becoming increasingly complex, with a large number of network elements which makes operations and maintenance more difficult and expensive to manage.
Then there is the crucially important issue of network traffic monetization. While the high penetration of smartphones boosts mobile internet traffic, it is becoming increasingly challenging for carriers to grow their service revenues from increasing traffic consumption alone.
NFV will help operators deal with each of these issues. It will enhance their network efficiency, flexibility and scalability, helping them to manage their ever-evolving business needs. It will improve their agility, shortening the innvoation cycle and time to market for new network services, helping them to create new business opportunities. And it will bring Opex and Capex down, reducing total cost and ensuring more robust financial performance."
He also gave a general introduction of the role he played in Project Unica. "Telefonica and Huawei's collaboration on Unica started in August of 2012 and a variety of joint activities have been carried out since then, ranging from the network planning to proof of concept tests. At the Mobile World Congress 2014, Telefonica showcased the UNICA Infrastructure which is enabled by Huawei's technologies and the two companies signed a MoU for Telco cloud cooperation. Huawei is proud to have the opportunity to partner with Telefónica on this important project and we are happy and encouraged by the progress we have made so far. "
Besides Telefónica, Huawei is also partnering with other top-tier telecom operators such as Deutsche Telekom to carry out joint innovation in relation to NFV technologies. Currently, many of the joint projects are at the proof of concept and lab test phase. Various challenges and difficulties in terms of performance, security, and interoperability testing need to be overcome and the trial commercial sites are expected to be available in 2015.
He revealed that the biggest challenge that NFV presents to operators is that they must ensure network performance and user experience within the new NFV architecture. Carriers not only need to adopt applications based on versatile hardware and cloud OS to provide carrier-grade network performance and stability; they also need to ensure fast end-to-end service deployment and deliver high-quality user experience with an increasingly dynamic and flexible network that is vertically and horizontally more open than ever before.
NFV presents similar challenges for vendors, however the system performance cannot be compromised by the increased level of versatility and flexibility.
In addition, an NFV network environment typically involves a greater diversity of network devices, so the standardization of interfaces, thorough interconnection tests and full integration of capabilities are critical for the deployment and operation of any NFV networks. We believe that the customers will be willing to invest in real NFV deployment when performance can be guaranteed.
He believed that what's more important for operators is the opportunity NFV affords them to drive new revenues in the face of declining value in traditional voice nd data services. It's about a move to more of an internet operational model, more agility and more on-demand services.
“the original interview was with telecoms.com and published in April 2014 issue of MCI magazine”.