China Telecom, HPE open Beijing NFV lab

China Telecom has announced that its Beijing Research Institute has collaborated with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to open a dedicated NFV lab in China.

It claims that the lab will help China Telecom to develop and implement NFV strategies and technologies, accelerating the innovation of new offerings to its customers. NFV has been one of the most talked about networking technologies of 2015, with more than 30 live rollouts of the tech in varying forms having taken place in carrier networks around the world. The aim of NFV, in short, is to reduce complexity in the network, make the scale-out of network functions more agile which in turn leads to more rapid and innovative service delivery with a reduction of opex and capex.

The NFV lab will be run on HPE’s OpenNFV infrastructure stack and reference architecture, with technical expertise coming from HPE’s in-house team. HPE says the lab will enable China Telecom to test and verify the benefits of transforming from legacy networks to an NFV and SDN-enabled infrastructure in a safe environment prior to deployment; a sentiment backed up by HPE’s manager of NFV in China, He Jianbo.

“CSPs need to have both the vision and the agility to respond quickly to new market opportunities,” he said. “NFV will deliver carrier-grade solutions that offer available and reliable network performance. This will help Chinese and global CSPs compete more effectively and deliver new services more quickly to its customers at a lower cost.”

Li Zhigang, China Telecom Beijing Research Institute’s president says NFV and SDN is the next big thing for the telco’s network.

“We believe that the integration of NFV within SDN-enabled infrastructure will be the next stage of evolution for the strategic development of the China Telecom network,” he said. “We hope that our collaborative efforts with HPE will result in the creation of NFV solutions which meet our needs, and advance the transformation of our networks.”