Road to Network Cloudification: Australia & New Zealand

Continuing the "Road to Network Cloudification" series where our focus is on summarizing the virtualization journey so far, status & 5G related news of some of the major Operators in the region being discussed.

In the earlier articles we have looked at US,Canada, India, UK , Rest of Europe, Singapore, South Korea & Japan. In this post we will be looking into some of the major operators for Australia & New Zealand.  The hyperlinks above will take to the post of the respective regions.

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:13th August 2020.

Australia

    1. Telstra :

• Virtualization Journey/Status:
• Telstra's NFV journey kicked off around 2015 time frame and in Feb 2016 they selected Ericsson's Telco Cloud in full stack which included their NFV and SDN offering. The Telco cloud solution involved Openstack based virtualization layer and virtualized EPC & IMS as well.
• In Feb 2017, Telstra decided to extend use of Ericsson's Cloud from Network functions to include broadcast media workload.
  
• In 2020, Telstra deployed Ericsson's cloud native and container based Evolved Packet Core for 4G and 5G services on Ericsson's Openstack based NFVI.
  

• 5G News:
  
• Telstra launched 5G in Australia in May 2019 and more than 47 cities had 5G coverage by May 2020.

    2. Optus:

• Virtualization Journey/Status/5G News:
• Like other Australian operators, Optus started discussing about NFV, SDN in 2014 time frame
  
• In Feb 2019, Optus confirmed that there multi vendor strategy for 5G did not include Huawei and launched 5G in November 2019 with Ericsson 5G RAN products.
• Also in 2020, Optus launched SDN Automation Platform: 'Liquid Infrastructure' for enterprise customers.
  

    3. Vodafone Australia(VHA):

• Virtualization Journey/Status:
• Vodafone Australia started its vision of Network of the Future in 2014, involving NFV and SDN by selecting Ericsson to deliver new core network for future services like 4G LTE and Voice Over LTE (VoLTE).
  
• Further in 2017, Vodafone Hutchinson Australia finalized Ericsson & Cisco to transform and virtualize their core & IP network. The deal was the first major collaboration between Ericsson and Cisco on Telecom Cloud infrastructure. 
  
• The key components of the deal included: Ericsson Cloud Execution Environment, Ericsson Cloud Manager, Cloud SDN controller; together with Cisco WAN Automation Engine, Cisco Network Services Orchestrator (NSO), Cisco IP Network VNFs including IOS XR 9000v and Cloud Services Router 1000v, and both virtualized and physical security technologies such as the Adaptive Security Appliance and Cisco Firepower security gateway, along with services and support.

• 5G News:
  
• Unlike the Vodafone Group decision to select VMware Telco Cloud for 5G, VHA decided to chart its own strategy for 5G in 2019.
  
• In Dec 2019, VHA selected Nokia as part of its 5G strategy for the radio access network (RAN), IP/Optical, Microwave, deployment and managed services.
• In March 2020, VHA turned on first 5G site in Australia.
  

New Zealand

Vodafone/2Degree/Spark :

• Virtualization Journey/Status:
• Vodafone New Zealand's network transformation to cloud kicked off in 2014-15 time frame, with Vodafone selecting Nokia networks and their cloud based IMS network for VoLTE call offering.
  
• 2 degrees as part of their virtualization effort In 2016, selected Metaswitch's(now Microsoft)coloud native vIMS solution for the VoLTE offering and later extended it along with Affirmed's EPDG for VoWifi Offering in 2018. 
• New Zealand's 3rd operator Spark started discussing NFV SDN in 2015 and even did a POC with Metaswitch for VoLTE. In addition in 2015, Spark selected Cisco's Packet Core and along with Metaswitch provided virtualized VoLTE offering. 
• In 2017, Spark signed Ericsson for their vIMS offering to support VoLTE & VoWifi in the future.
  

• 5G News:
  
• Vodafone New Zealand has already launched commercial 5G in December 2019 as it has acquired licenses from before. The 5G network was deployed using Nokia's 5G cloud native solution.
  
• Spark after getting license from government launched commercial 5G in July 2020 in 1 city with plans to launch in 4 more before year end.As part of 5G network Nokia, Samsung and Huawei RAN was used while Ericsson & Cisco for Network Core.
  
• Unlike Vodafone & Spark, 2Degree has just started working on 5G in June 2020 when they confirmed that they are  starting to build 5G network after government decision to allocate early access 3.5GHz spectrum to the company.

Disclaimer:

The details presented above is based on data available online.The references used are available in the hyperlinks for Most of Australia & New Zealand. However some references area available at: https://matelecom.blogspot.com/p/references-road-to-network_13.html