Telefónica has announced a new partnership with Huawei which will see the Chinese giant take a prominent role in its Unica project.

As part of the new agreement, Huawei will assist Telefónica in building a large scale virtual Evolved Packet Core (vEPC) in thirteen countries spread through Latin America and Europe. Unica is one of the industry’s largest virtualization projects, aimed at virtualizing network functions in an automated way across all of Telefónica’s operations.

Using Huawei’s vEPC solution, named CloudEPC, the pair hope to adapt Telefónica ’s aging network to cope with traffic growth, as well offering greater flexibility to adapt to the changing environment. Unica on the whole aims to help Telefónica to more readily serve the customers in the digitally orientated era with more efficient traditional services, as well as IoT/M2M, MVNO, private LTE, and Mobile-Edge Computing.

“Telefónica has been actively working for some time in the evolution of network virtualization technologies,” said Javier Gavilán, Planning and Technology Director at Telefónica. “Huawei is a reliable EPC vendor, and a strategic partner of Telefónica collaborating in many NFV areas.

“This large scale vEPC network deployment is a further step within the Telefónica UNICA virtualization program where a smooth migration to UNICA infra cloud capabilities will be reached following extensive test in Telefónica LAB. These results provide the confidence needed to continue with the adoption and deployment of virtualized solutions and to enable the transformation to software-driven networking,”

“Huawei is leading the All Cloud strategy for operators’ business success,” said Michael Ma, President of Cloud Core Network at Huawei. “This CloudEPC network build out represents a significant step forward in Telefónica’s cloud transformation roadmap and reinforces our long standing partnership as main EPC provider to Telefónica.”