China Mobile has stepped up its efforts in NFV with the launch of a lab in Beijing last week, as the mobile giant continues to embrace virtualization of its mobile network.
The OPNFV (Open Platform for NFV) lab, touted as the first of its kind in Asia, is aimed at providing an open, standards-based and integrated environment for chipset manufacturers, cloud system providers and software suppliers to test various technical aspects of OPNFV, such as functionality, performance and reliability.
In future the lab will also cover different aspects of telecom networks, including access networks, core networks, transmission networks and data centers, said Bill Huang, head of China Mobile Research Institute.
The operator has initially collaborated with nine vendors: Dell, Huawei, HP, Intel, Quanta, Redhat, Spirent, Wind River and ZTE.
China Mobile, which is one of the six co-founding operators for the OPNFV, has begun exploring network virtualization technology as early as 2010 in the DSN and C-RAN projects with partners.
China Mobile vice president Li Zhengmao said the company currently “has achieved some initial successes” on NFV technology, including the completion of product development of NFV-based Nano Cell gateway, a trial of vIMS in VoLTE network and researching virtualization on the EPC network.
From the beginning of 2015, China Mobile will apply virtualization in its network design, introduce new program, test pilot, standardization in order to embrace NFV in full swing, Li added.