TAG velcom Starts New Journey to Cloud Transformation

velcom, the subsidiary of Telecom Austria Group (TAG), is a leading mobile operator in Belarus, with over 40% market share and about 5 million mobile users. As NFV technologies mature and have been put into commercial use, velcom hopes to reconstruct traditional networks in cooperation with ZTE by deploying all its legacy core networks onto the unified cloud, so as to achieve smooth digital transformation.

Challenges from the Legacy Network

To meet the increasing demands of data and multimedia services, 4G services are emerging in Belarus, and all operators start to plan their 4G service development. The strategic target for velcom is deploying evolved packet core (EPC) service to quickly deliver 4G services with low costs and improving its competitiveness to secure a dominate position in the market.
As velcom's legacy network
equipment operated for a very long time, its reliability showed an increasing failure rate. Its high operating costs also brought a huge burden to velcom: the complex network with too many NEs made network maintenance more difficult and time-consuming. Besides, as the legacy network used private hardware platforms of multiple vendors, it is very difficult to upgrade it to a 4G network. The upgrade might result in high expense, and the evolution to IMS, VoLTE and cloud would be impossible. All this greatly hindered velcom from achieving its strategic target.

Building a Full Cloud Core Network with ZTE's Cloud UniCore

TAG has chosen ZTE as a long-term strategic partner, and they have cooperated widely in many fields. After in-depth discussions and exchanges with ZTE in the NFV field, velcom finally selected ZTE to deploy a full cloud core network for its rich NFV deployment experience and advanced cloud UniCore solution.
ZTE's cloud UniCore solution based on ETSI reference architecture utilizes open source technologies to decouple software from hardware and provide a full array of core network solutions that are highly reliable, easy to manage and easy to integrate, enable carrier-grade enhancements, and can cover 2G/3G/4G/5G core networks. ZTE takes a leading position in the industry. In the NFV-based core network project, velcom adopted ZTE's cloud UniCore solution to build a unified telecom cloud that was distributed in three data centers and deployed with all core network elements such as vEPC, vSDM, vIMS, and vCS. All traditional core network elements were smoothly migrated to a fully virtualized platform (Fig. 1).

Also, velcom used ZTE's tulip elastic cloud system (TECS)—a carrier-grade cloud platform based on OpenStack. With performance optimization and distributed geographical redundancy, TECS could meet the requirements of high performance and carrier-grade reliability (99.999%), offering second-level elasticity and zero service loss. Through a virtual infrastructure, TECS implemented centralized scheduling and management to reduce operating costs, allowing velcom to regain flexibility through easy configuration of new services and improve the security as well as reliability.
By transforming and virtualizing its core network into vCore, velcom managed to abolish its legacy silo-based network and significantly cut service running costs, while ensuring higher flexibility, feature richness and reliability for velcom’s customers of voice and data services. This project provides velcom with one of the most innovative telecom core architectures worldwide. It is also the only project of a size of more than five million subscribers.
"With this major step towards the next generation network architecture, we are able to significantly reduce our opex spending, benefit from massive economies of scale for further growth and provide highest flexibility and service value to our customers on the way towards a fully cloud-based network architecture," said Sascha Zabransky, Director Technology, Telekom Austria Group.

Benefits to velcom

ZTE's cloud UniCore solution creates a more simple, reliable, cost-effective, and open core network for velcom, greatly promoting internet service innovation and flexible deployment based on IT and CT converged architecture. The solution is compatible with future-oriented 5G core network architecture to improve customer value: 
●   The efficiency of new products and services release can be improved by 42%.
●   Multiple DCs share basic resources, so that resource efficiency can be increased twofold.
●   With the full cloudization, TCO can be reduced by over 50%.
In cooperation with ZTE, velcom successfully built the first and most complete virtual core network in Belarus or even in the world. As a result, velcom not only gains the leading position in the telecom market in Belarus, but also serves as a model for global operators in their network transformation.