LOS ANGELES—Affirmed Networks announced that its virtualized Evolved Packet Core (vEPC) is now available to mobile operators on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The company calls it the first “Mobile Network as a Service” solution that enables service providers to quickly and economically deliver both 4G and 5G services over a scalable cloud infrastructure without requiring a lot of capital investments.
According to Amit Tiwari, vice president of Strategic Alliances and Systems Engineering at Affirmed Networks, there’s enough of a groundswell among both existing and potentially new customers where the time is right to introduce this.
Transatel, a long-time customer of Affirmed Networks, is using the solution to embrace a new breed of business models to serve enterprise and consumers globally. Transatel is a European Mobile Virtual Network Enabler/Aggregator that launched more than 150 MVNOs and built up a M2M connectivity business before entering the IoT space.
“We’re now able to cost-effectively expand into new markets in an ‘on demand’ manner, and thus accommodate rapid changes in dimensioning to follow growth,” said Bertrand Salomon, deputy CEO of Transatel, in a statement. “This new architecture is enhancing our ability to deliver innovative new service offerings.”
The vendor says that with vEPC, operators can deliver differentiated services—such as IoT/M2M services, enterprise data services, MVNO wholesale services, 4G and 5G—without costly data center or network infrastructure investments. The cloud offering accelerates an operator’s ability to deliver new services, thereby reducing overall time to market and enabling faster onboarding of subscribers.
With AWS’ global reach, that means operators can serve geographies they might not otherwise reach with their own networks.
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Affirmed Networks, which was named one of FierceTelecom’s top disruptors of 2018, has been one of the leading vendors for NFV and got into the game before NFV was an industry buzzword. Customers include AT&T, Vodafone and SoftBank and its vEPC is used by some 80 customers worldwide.
“We were looking to create a disruptive technology for how service providers run their networks in terms of virtualization of the physical functions,” Tiwari told FierceWirelessTech. “We set out to actually do automation.”
One of the trends that Affirmed Networks has observed is that its competitors have been looking at orchestration to solve problems. “We have taken a very pragmatic approach where we do service automation” to solve a specific need, he said. "When you do that, customers not only notice the ease of use and cap ex savings, but also savings on the operational side and ability to launch new services."