Ericsson Previews a Variety of Cellular, NFV, SDN News

Ericsson (News - Alert) this week unleashed a flurry of announcements – many of them centered on the hot themes of network functions virtualization and software-defined networking – just a couple weeks ahead of Mobile World Congress, at which it will be showing many of these new products and capabilities.

Thomas Noren, head of Ericsson Radio, and Arun Bhikshesvaran, the company’s chief marketing officer, spoke with TMCnet yesterday to explain what’s meaningful about the various news announcements.

A new, virtualized evolved packet core is among the just unveiled solutions. This is important because virtualization can enable faster time to market for distributed cloud for rural mobile broadband, enterprise, and machine-to-machine applications.

Noren said Ericsson has been a driving force in the network functions virtualization movement for a long time, and the company believes that NFV is about a lot more than disconnecting software from hardware and reducing costs. NFV is about a fundamental change that will enable service providers to bring new services to market faster, he said.

Ericsson is a member of the OpenStack Foundation, he added, and last year the company introduced the Ericsson Cloud System, which is based on the OpenStack architecture.

The new vEPC solution is built on the Ericsson Cloud System, which is now in trials with several service providers.

The company’s existing EPC is a market-leading solution, he added, and the new virtualized EPC – to be generally available starting in the fourth quarter – will have feature parity with the classic EPC. Ericsson expects to demonstrate its vEPC running on a Dell (News - Alert) COTS platform.

Also coming soon from Ericsson is Networks Software 14B, which will be available mid year. This is important because it can be used to improve network performance. There are more than 200 new and enhanced features included in this release. Among them are LTE (News - Alert) carrier aggregation for three carriers, support for speeds of up to 450mbps, and a new power sharing feature.

Today the company also formally unveiled the Ericsson Network Manager, an SDN-based tool that lets administrators automate and manage virtualized networks. This kind of tool is important, said Noren, because as carriers upgrade their networks they are using many more base stations/nodes, so they need the tools to enable them to deploy and do network optimization on these elements more easily – and that, in turn, can allow for a better end user experience. The first domains will be managed by Ericsson Network Manager in the fourth quarter of this year.

“Ericsson Network Manager provides unified network management in a single platform, making for ease of transition as service providers look to consolidate their network operations,” said Anil Rao, industry analyst with Analysys (News - Alert) Mason’s Telecoms Software research team, which Ericsson quoted in its press release about the new offering. 

“Communication service providers know that achieving the best end user customer experience is one of their top priorities today. The Ericsson Network Manager is a step-up and the right approach toward providing an integrated, end-to-end network view, along with the flexibility and automation needed to deliver a compelling customer experience that can differentiate the operator.”

Also new from Ericsson is Service Agility, a framework in which several software stacks are deployed to enable faster and more reliable service fulfillment and assurance. It's a combination of Ericsson's own software and some acquired capabilities, explained Bhikshesvaran, who added that this software is available now for trials and implementation in customer networks. This is important for any service provider that is interested in accelerating its service to market, thereby accelerating time-to-cash from new offerings, he said.

Telecom Cloud Transformation, meanwhile, is a new practice that provides operators with consulting and systems integration services to help them move to what Ericsson refers to as network-enabled cloud architecture. 

The new Small Cell as a Service offering from Ericsson is targeted at large indoor space deployments. About 70 percent of mobile data traffic is generated indoors, and modern buildings tend to have glass coatings and heat and light protection that inhibit good coverage from macro cellular networks, so this solution addresses all that, explained Bhikshesvaran.

“The service offering will follow typical XaaS pricing models applied to this context,” added Bhikshesvaran. “These include capacity, coverage, density, building characteristics, and of course location.”

Finally, Ericsson also took the wraps off Ericsson Mobile UC today, a white-label unified communications service it’s providing to operators, which can use it to offer cloud-based communication and collaboration based on IMS and VoLTE.