A couple months ago, Mavenir announced the successful deployment of a cloud-native 5G core to support Deutsche Telekom’s 5G Standalone (SA) network in Germany. Mavenir also was deemed a preferred vendor across Deutsche Telekom group properties.
Last week, Mavenir announced that Magyar Telekom in Hungary, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom, is deploying Mavenir’s cloud-native containerized converged packet core.
Mavenir has been engaged with DT for quite some time. The deployment in Hungary is an extension of that relationship, according to Dejan Leskaroski, VP and head of Product Management, Packet Core, at Mavenir.
Although 5G is the lead story here, Magyar Telekom, like a lot of operators in Europe, wanted to be able to support 2G data, he told Fierce. In fact, they wanted someone who could support 2G and 5G and everything in between.
“Having a common architecture and then being able to eventually migrate even their 2G data for IoT devices, that’s, I think, unique to the Mavenir solution,” he said.
They also wanted the ability to do a remote user plane. Traditionally, everything is deployed centralized for the user plane function, but being able to disaggregate the user plane and bring it closer to the edge was also important, he said.
Tarek Elbasyouny, chief architect, is part of the Mavenir team supporting DT’s 5G core deployment.
Regarding this deployment with Magyar Telekom, “we make sure all the features they already have will continue to be supported seamlessly using our software,” Elbasyouny said.
“It’s also about voice, not only data,” he said. Voice over LTE will be one of the services Mavenir continues to support, as well as voice over Wi-Fi. Voice over 5G New Radio (VoNR) will be the next migration step that it will support in the future.
While Mavenir supports both 5G SA and 5G non-standalone for DT in Germany, in Hungary they’re actually starting with 5G SA and later will add NSA and 4G access, he said.
Leskaroski said Mavenir’s core supports both 5G SA and 5G NSA, so it will work with whichever way the operator chooses to go. “They don’t have to deploy two different cores for those different deployments,” he said.
Elbasyouny said one of the use cases that the organization in Hungary is considering is network slicing. “It’s one of the deliverables that we will achieve,” he said.