Turkcell and Affirmed Networks announced they have just deployed one of the largest virtualized mobile networks in the EMEA region, supporting more than 35 million mobile broadband subscribers and carrying over a terabit per second of customer traffic across the region.
The news follows last February’s announcement that Turkcell had selected Affirmed Networks as its partner to provide virtualized network infrastructure for the operator’s network transformation initiative designed to streamline costs and drive revenue growth.
Over the past year, to support this strategic initiative, Affirmed Networks provided the operator’s virtualized GiLAN solution and Turkcell’s “Unified Telco Cloud” platform. Turkcell’s centralized cloud uses the Red Hat OpenStack Platform, supported by Red Hat Ceph Storage. Affirmed Networks also provides Turkcell’s Data Optimization solution, which represents one of its largest NFV deployments.
The Turkcell network now provides a variety of services, including data optimization, CGN, DPI and control plane services that include VoLTE, PCRF and AAA.
According to the operator, it’s getting the desired consequences of going virtual rather than relying on legacy, capital-intensive hardware network infrastructure. For example, it’s able to deploy new services, such as IMS, much sooner.
“We initially selected Affirmed Networks based on their innovation in the area of network transformation and virtualization and their work with some of the world’s largest operators,” said Turkcell CTO Gediz Sezgin in a statement. “Our decision has been reinforced many times throughout the deployment, as we were continually impressed by the speed in which we were able to move from testing to roll-out; a process that took as little as four months for us to virtualize the critical services required for the success of the project.”
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Affirmed Networks Chairman and CEO Hassan Ahmed said many factors were key to the success of this initiative. “Turkcell began with a powerful vision and clear objectives for the virtualization of their mobile network,” he said in prepared remarks. “We combined our accomplished teams with key learnings and best practices from deployments we have completed with other top operators globally to implement this network quickly.”
Affirmed Networks will continue to support Turkcell for the next 3 to 5 years, helping to make sure the day-to-day operations run smoothly.