Telefónica has validated AWS Outposts as an effective infrastructure option for Vivo Brazil to deploy the 5G Core technology required to offer standalone 5G services in its operations, announced the Operator last week.
As part of its 5G and operational transformation programs, Telefónica is driving the introduction of 5G standalone (SA) cloud-native platforms across its major operating businesses in order to improve automation and drive new revenues.
This milestone provides Telefônica Vivo with a potential path for rapidly building out its 5G network in the country and introduces new operational processes, such as Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment, and Continuous Testing (CI/CD/CT), improving software life cycle management through automation. It also sets in motion new use cases based on 5G access, such as drone control or remote maintenance management, among others.
Vivo took a multi-vendor approach collaborating with Mavenir, Nokia and Oracle, who provided the network functions of the 5G SA Core. The selection of network functions has been done to cover both control plane and user plane, testing afterwards both type of workloads. The cloud native capabilities of the 5G SA core have eased the onboarding and instantiation of virtual network functions over AWS infrastructure. The execution of these capabilities has demonstrated its correct functionality both in the AWS South America (São Paulo) Region and in Telefonica’s data centers (on-premises) via AWS Outposts.
AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that offers the same AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools to virtually any on-premises facility.
Cayetano Carbajo, Director of Core, Service Platforms and Transport in Telefónica CTIO said,"Thanks to this project, Telefónica has reached a clear milestone in its 5G plans in Brazil and also for its deployment strategy in the group, where cloud native 5G platforms allow a wide range of private and public infrastructure options."
Fabio Cerone, Managing Director, EMEA Telco, Amazon Web Services said,"With the option to build their 5G Core on AWS, Telefónica is opening the door to leveraging AWS’s breadth and depth of cloud services across their on-premises locations. With AWS, Telefónica can fully automate their network and dynamically scale and allocate their 5G network capacity to meet the needs of their business and consumer customers."