Polaris Networks today announced that its NetEPC product, the carrier-grade solution for LTE EPC Packet Core combining the functionalities of the MME, SGW, PGW, HSS and PCRF is now generally available for deployment in a cloud environment.
LTE promises high throughput and low latency which translates to a better mobile experience for users who can now download and upload videos, photos, documents and songs at a speed which is several notches higher that what 3G provides. Hence, it is natural that users will look to move to LTE sooner than later. This makes it essential for all service providers to offer LTE services. However, with all the advantages that LTE has in store for the users, the technology presents several challenges to the operators, who need to address the business challenges of migrating to LTE. This is especially relevant in the case of the smaller carriers (Tier II and Tier III) for whom the hardware setup and operational costs of offering LTE services would be more demanding financially compared to the larger players.
Having the EPC in a cloud, which could be shared by several small carriers, will help to reduce the capital investment and operational expenditure. By not hosting the EPC themselves, the smaller carriers do not have to incur the infrastructure expenses and will also not have to address the network maintenance and management issues. This means that several operators will turn to the Cloud based Hosted Services to minimize the risk while migrating to providing LTE services. This will further enable the operator to scale up the services seamlessly.
“Our focus with the NetEPC© has always been the small service providers and in keeping with this we decided to optimize the software for a cloud based deployment”, said Aditya Saraf, VP, Sales and Marketing. “The Polaris NetEPC© has been tested on different virtualized environments like VMware, Virtual Box etc. It has also been demonstrated successfully on Amazon EC2 Infrastructure as a Service. As part of our services, we shall also make the NetEPC available on the hosted service providers’ private cloud, if necessary. Going forward we plan add load balancing /management software which will allow the EPC to scale based on dynamic load conditions”.
Apart from the NetEPC©, Polaris also has a range of Test and Measurement tools for LTE which are used by leading vendors for pre-deployment testing and evaluating the performance and stability of the network nodes.
Polaris will be demonstrating the NetEPC© as well as the LTE Test Solutions at the CCA Global Expo which is to be held in New Orleans from April 17-19, 2013.