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Road to Network Cloudification: India

Road to Network Cloudification: India

"Road to Network Cloudification" : Series focusing on summarizing the virtualization journey so far, current status & 5G related news of some of the major Operators in a region/country. 

In the last article we had looked at US & Canada. In this post we are now looking into India .
 
Note: As of 21st August, 2020 have started a new post with summary table capturing all regions, the operators from these post and their NFV ecosystem and 5G status. 
URL: https://matelecom.blogspot.com/2020/08/road-to-network-cloudification-summary-table.html  

Last Updated: 4th Jan 2022.

INDIA

    1. Bharti Airtel :
  • Virtualization Journey/Status:
    • Airtel started virtualizing their network around 2015/16 time frame and by 2016 had completely virtualized its physical networks using VMWARE NSX.
    • SK Telecom partnered with Bharti Airtel(India) in 2017 to jointly work for 5G, NFV, SDN and IoT. Both organizations will work on the standards and enabling ecosystem for introduction of these technologies from Indian perspective.
    • In 2019,  Airtel selected Ericsson's 5G Ready Cloud Packet Core to boost existing network Performance.
    • Also, in 2020 Altiostar's open vRAN solution was selected by Airtel for their existing 4G customers & extending same for future 5G use.
    • In July 2020, Airtel, under its cloudification strategy, selected Nokia’s CloudBand software to power the telco's Voice over LTE (VoLTE) network in India. The solution will also help Airtel to create new revenue opportunities for 5G and internet-connected devices.
    2. Vi (Previously known as Vodafone Idea Ltd(VIL):
  • Virtualization Journey/Status:
    • Vodafone Idea is a recently formed merged entity in 2018 between Vodafone India & Idea Cellular. As of September 2020, the company got rebranded to Vi . P.S the article is written prior to rebranding.
    • Before merger, in 2017 Vodafone group had selected VMWare as one of the vendors for NFV Global rollout.
    • Similarly, before merger Idea Cellular had chosen Nokia's cloud core to run both data and voice traffic and eventually support 5G.
    • The Merged Entity Vodafone Idea Ltd. started their NFV SDN trials towards end of 2018 and in 2019 decided to use Ericsson's Cloud Packet core offering to support their existing data demands and 5G in future.
    • Also VIL's IMS VoLTE was deployed using Mavenir's cloud native solution for their 4G & 5G core.
    • In 2019, VIL decided to setup a universal cloud for Network & IT workloads. VIL partnered with Cisco to build an automated multi cloud network for its retail and enterprise customers.
    • VIL also selected IBM and Red Hat to build, operate, automate and orchestrate the Network Cloud for both VMs and container traffic and by 2020 the Open Hybrid Universal cloud was live supporting nearly 300 million subscribers in production.
    • VIL also deployed Open RAN for its 4G offering and in 2020 expanded its RAN pool to include Mavenir's Open RAN as well.
    • As of 2020, Vi has more than 88 Telco Clouds installed in India as told by CTO Vishant Vora during #ETDigitalTelco Round table and has both Network & IT workloads running on the Cloud
    3. Reliance Jio :
  • Virtualization Journey/Status:
    • Reliance Jio started its operations in 2016 as a Greenfield operator and deployed a fully virtualized network. 
    • Jio's all IP network was built using Cisco's SDN offerings and without any circuit switches.
    • Other vendors who contributed towards setting up of Jio's fully virtual greenfield network included Samsung, Mavenir, Nokia, Oracle &  Ciena.
    • Jio leveraged open source and customized them to suit its need. Jio's virtual functions were deployed on Openstack infrastructure from Mirantis which has inbuilt kubernetes support for containers & built an in house MANO solution using ONAP.
    • It also built its SDN controller using ONOS & OpenDaylight
    • In 2018, in order to expedite capability building towards 5G & IoT deployment, Reliance Jio also acquired Radisys.


Disclaimer:
The details presented above is based on data available online.The references used are available on:  https://matelecom.blogspot.com/p/references-road-to-network_18.html

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