Telefónica and Ericsson collaborate over cloud-VoLTE in Colombia

Latin American incumbent operator Telefónica has claimed the launch of Colombia’s first cloud-based voice over LTE service, in partnership with Ericsson.

Rival operator Avantel was the country’s first mobile operator to announce its intentions to launch VoLTE, working with Nokia Networks, although a live commercial deployment is yet to be publicly announced. Telefónica looks to have taken advantage of its competitor’s delay by getting its cloud-based VoLTE service off the ground.

There’s an element of NFV about the deployment, with Ericsson claiming to have utilised a virtualized IMS networking function, integrated with its Cloud Execution Environment, to help deploy the high-definition calling tech.

Enrique Blanco, the global CTO for Telefónica, has been actively leading the telco’s public NFV charge, and gave his thoughts on the rollout. “Network virtualization brings huge opportunities for efficiency and agility; we aim to have a common and complete solution for Telco, IT and Enterprise Services,” he said.

VoLTE is set to be one of the dominant trends for operator rollouts in 2016. The Telecoms.com Intelligence Annual Industry Survey 2016 found that 43% of operators are planning on deploying a live VoLTE service over the next 12 months.

Meanwhile, Telefónica subsidiary ElevenPaths has announced the launch of an IoT security offering which can intelligently identify vulnerabilities in devices on the network and appropriately act to plug potential holes before they become exploited by an outsider. Telefónica claims the solution, called Faast, means companies can continually scan IoT devices connected to an enterprise network then be rapidly informed of any insecurities, such as authentication or authorisation issues or a lack of encryption when transmitting information.

“Traditional periodic security checks don’t make sense anymore because the changes in the infrastructure, the emergence of new vulnerabilities and different bugs are continuing”, said Chema Alonso, ElevenPaths CEO. “The evolution of Vamps [a web-based interface for the solution] & Faast towards IoT will allow companies to rely on a persistent pentesting and vulnerability management system that will facilitate the quick discovery of new connected devices and possible bugs, thereby reducing the exposure time of these devices to these threats”.