Cisco confirmed that its Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) is being used to support the NFV capabilities recently rolled out in NTT DOCOMO commercial LTE network. DOCOMO serves over 70 million mobile customers in Japan. Financial terms were not disclosed.
“DOCOMO is working to provide our customers with high-quality telecommunications services that address the increasing demands of data,” said Seizo Onoe, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, NTT DOCOMO INC. “We are pleased that we have built an NFV system employing Cisco’s SDN solution ACI for our network infrastructure. We look forward to working with Cisco to build an ecosystem for the mobile network industry.”
“Cisco Systems is proud to expand our relationship with DOCOMO through a co-development model for NFV deployments,” said Soni Jiandani, Senior Vice President of Cisco. “In order to meet the needs of our customers, we continue to offer the broadest choice of SDN solutions in the market. Taking advantage of Cisco ACI innovations for NFV, DOCOMO is able to lead the industry in the rapidly changing environment of mobility services.”
ACI is Cisco Systems next-generation SDN solution incorporating application profiles for the integrated management of virtualized network functions, whether the functions are deployed purpose-built hardware, physical servers, virtual servers, or container-based micro-services. The ACI solution is comprised of Cisco Nexus 9000 switches, a policy controller called the Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC), and the ACI operating system.
NTT DOCOMO Deploys NFV with NEC in Commercial Network
NEC confirmed that NTT DOCOMO has deployed its NFV solutions, including virtualized Evolved Packet Core (vEPC) and a Virtual Network Function Manager (VNF Manager), in its commercial networks.
On March 9, DOCOMO started providing its commercial mobile communication service by using the NFV technologies.
The vEPC virtualizes the functions of a LTE core network, including the Mobility Management Entity (MME), the Serving Gateway (S-GW), and the Packet Data Network-Gateway (P-GW). A VNF Manager from Netcracker, a wholly owned NEC subsidiary, handles lifecycle events, such as creation, activation, termination and update of virtualized Network Functions (VNF).
“I’m delighted that we have developed and deployed NFV with NEC and other leading vendors in the NFV domain. To maximize benefit of NFV, DOCOMO expects to virtualize many other key components of its mobile network, aiming to eventually establish a fully virtualized network. I’m convinced that our multi-vendor NFV is the first step toward our goal,” said Mr. Seizo Onoe, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, NTT DOCOMO.
“We are delighted to contribute to DOCOMO’s successful deployment of network virtualization technologies for their commercial networks,” said Mr. Shunichiro Tejima, Executive Vice President, NEC Corporation. “With this success, NEC will further expand commercial deployment of NFV based solutions globally, which enable telecom operators to introduce innovative services to the market more quickly and efficiently.”
