At Mobile World Congress, Cisco unveiled Ultra, its new virtualized, feature-rich, mobile services platform. Deutsche Telekom is creating a multi-country mobile cloud. SK Telecom of South Korea is automating new service creation using Cisco Ultra.
Some highlights:
- SDN enables user plane functionality to be distributed close to the radio access network, allowing data to shortcut to the Internet. This reduces backhaul traffic
- Service creation and control can be centralized, allowing operators to be more agile
- Massive scale: In its first release, the system is tested to over two terabytes per second of traffic handling capacity, and over 20 million connections.
- Time to revenue: It simplifies and speeds the introduction of new services, from Connected Car to enterprise private mobile networks.
- Automated deployments: It automates the deployment of services through an easy to use user interface. Deployment intervals can be reduced from months to minutes, and deployment costs can be reduced by 30 percent or more.
- Open and extensible: Ultra can easily integrate with third-party components. A full member of the Cisco Open Network Architecture and Evolved Services Platform, Ultra can easily onboard any of the more than 100 virtual applications in the virtualized network functions portfolio, plus third-party virtual applications.
- Ultra is deployable over public, private, or hybrid clouds, and may be combined with Cisco SaaS solutions like Infinite Video, Spark, and others.
“With the new Ultra services platform, our global customers will be able to do things in near real time, that previously took hours or days,” said Kelly Ahuja, senior vice president, Service Provider business, products and solutions, Cisco. “Together we are able to deliver a transformational customer experience today, while preparing the industry path to 5G.”
“We are seeing early customer adoption for the Ultra Services Platform, with eight operators worldwide, including three North American operators,” said Scott Yow, vice president, Ultra Services Platform, Cisco. “This unique, SDN distributed architecture will enable our customers to harness the full potential of virtualization, SDN, and cloud.”