Vodafone has successfully tested Metaswitch’s Access Gateway Function (AGF) solution – the industry’s first implementation of the 5G Wireless Wireline Convergence (WWC) AGF standard.
Metaswitch said its Access Gateway Function (AGF), which is part of its 5G Fusion Core, is a true cloud-native solution in which all functional elements, including User Plane Function (UPF) and Access Gateway Function (AGF), are deployed in containers and orchestrated by Kubernetes to ensure strong performance and network deployment flexibility for service providers.
5G Wireless Wireline Convergence offers a path to a fully converged broadband access network that serves both wireline and mobile subscribers from a single technology stack. This facilitates the use of common credentials, authentication and a unified approach to applying network policy. When fully implemented, WWC seamlessly integrates fixed and wireless services, simplifying service provider offerings, reducing the overall complexity of subscriber and service management, and promoting always-on services through converged connectivity.
The Metaswitch Fusion Core 5G WWC solution includes an Access Gateway Function built to align with the new Broadband Forum TR-456 specification, in addition to other 5G packet core functions including the world’s highest-performance software UPF. The Fusion Core UPF and AGF are both powered by Metaswitch’s Composable Network Application Processor (CNAP) software packet processing technology, which in recent tests conducted with Intel demonstrated 500 Gbps UPF throughput on a single two-socket industry-standard server.
The trial system was deployed remotely at Vodafone Labs in the UK, taking advantage of the automation capabilities of Kubernetes and Helm, and has successfully demonstrated the attachment of standard fixed network residential gateways (FN-RG) to the 5G packet core, with mapping between wireline broadband and 5G authentication, authorization and session establishment procedures performed in the AGF.
“We have been very active in supporting the Wireless Wireline Convergence activity in the Broadband Forum,” said Gavin Young, Head of Fixed Access Centre of Excellence at Vodafone Group, “and we are proud to be hosting the world’s first operator test of this technology. Working with Metaswitch, we have been able to prove that the technology works in practice, and we have been very impressed both by the performance of the AGF in Metaswitch’s 5G Fusion Core solution and its cloud native architecture. This trial more than justifies our faith in the value and the practicality of broadband convergence.”
