For decades, tier one telecom networks have been largely built around expensive “heavy metal” hardware elements, each serving specific purposes, often custom designed including software that was fully integrated into the hardware and could only be updated with official releases from the vendor.
This “closed” approach was expensive, inflexible, and led to massive overall cost of ownership for network operators and service providers and maintenance costs that generally added up to 15% of original (large) capex investments.
As architectures opened, with the support of organizations like the GSMA (which hosted Mobile World Congress (News - Alert) last week in Barcelona) the world of telecom has evolved to virtualized voice switches, session border controllers and other elements, enabling services to run on commercial-off-the-shelf “bare metal” blades.
Traditional line cards, codec boards and other elements, with specialized chips, have now been replaced by industry standard servers powered by modern CPUs, and while the transformation has not been without its challenges, today the industry finds itself squarely in the cloudification era.
With the rapid adoption of 5G networking, service providers are constantly seeking better, more agile and affordable technologies delivered on merchant silicon and following the success of cloud computing as a blueprint.
With the continued rise of cloud computing has come hyperscale facilities, and a global footprint of buildings stacked full of servers, ethernet switches and routers providing a platform that is infinitely scalable.
The proven scale of cloud computing is driving virtualization which, in turn, is having a major impact on voice wholesale. Voice networks are, in the most basic sense, packet forwarding devices with rules set by the routing systems. They rely on underlying IP transport networks, either public or private, but they are nowhere near so deeply integrated that they cannot evolve.
Cloud giants, including Amazon and Microsoft (News - Alert) Azure, continue to build their own voice services, and are learning in the process that there is an “art and science” when it comes to the most popular “app” in the world – real time voice communications which require ample CPU and memory, so voice quality is achievable.
A new, lighter, and more fluid wholesale voice ecosystem is here, and as evidenced by Turkcell’s (News - Alert) decision to engage Odine Solutions, an innovative global system integrator, and Ribbon, a pioneer in virtualization, to accelerate their transformation as a major regional provider of converged solutions.
The solution from Ondine and Ribbon, announced during MWC 2022, leverages Ribbon’s virtualized, container-ready solution, delivered by Odine, provides expanded interconnect capacity, flexibility, and automation and enables next-generation voice interconnect services for Turkcell.
“Virtualization and cloudification of existing services is a foundational step in our digitalization journey and also helps us lower costs and simplify operations through centralized management while enabling real-time resource allocation,” said Dr. Gediz Sezgin, Turkcell’s Chief Technology Officer. “We selected Ribbon and Odine based on their domain expertise, innovation, and disruptive solutions.”
The comprehensive solution, deployed in Turkcell’s core network, includes Ribbon’s SBC SWe, which delivers the features and capabilities of appliance-based SBCs in a virtual software footprint, PSX SWe, a virtualized version of our centralized policy and routing solution and a best in class, virtualized Element Management System (EMS).
“Our aim is to provide best of breed solutions with our expertise to the operators as they evolve to a software-based environment, which is driven by agile vendors. We are extremely pleased to be part of Turkcell’s digital transformation journey,” said Alper Tunga Burak, CEO, Odine.
“We’re proud to partner with Odine and Turkcell to enable virtualization of interconnect services for mobile and fixed networks, helping drive increased agility and reduced capital and operational expenditures over the solution lifecycle,” said Steve McCaffery, Ribbon’s EVP, EMEA & APAC Sales. “Our SBC SWe delivers key benefits including elasticity and high availability without compromising scale or performance over Turkell’s global IP network infrastructure. We look forward to further supporting Turkcell in its digitalization journey.”
Turkcell is a digital operator headquartered in Turkey, serving its customers with its unique portfolio of digital services along with voice, messaging, data and IPTV (News - Alert) services on its mobile and fixed networks. Turkcell Group companies operate in 4 countries – Turkey, Ukraine, Belarus, and Northern Cyprus. Turkcell launched LTE services in its home country on April 1st, 2016, employing LTE-Advanced and 3 carrier aggregation technologies in 81 cities.
Odine Solutions is a leading Systems Integrator focusing on Tier-1 Mobile Network Function Virtualization with expertise in production deployments of private & hybrid Telco Clouds.
Ribbon Communications (News - Alert) delivers communications software, IP and optical networking solutions to service providers, enterprises, and critical infrastructure sectors globally. Ribbon has a vast portfolio of patented technologies and an end-to-end solutions offering including core to edge software-centric solutions, cloud-native offers, security and analytics tools, along with IP and optical networking solutions for 5G.
Arti Loftus is an experienced Information Technology specialist with a demonstrated history of working in the research, writing, and editing industry with many published articles under her belt.Edited by
Luke Bellos
