blog When you get into the datacentres of Australia’s big telcos (as I’ve had the chance to do on occasion), what you’ll find is that their network infrastructure is highly heterogenuous. You get a lot of Juniper, a lot of Alcatel-Lucent, a lot of Ericsson, a lot of Nokia-Siemens Networks and if you look hard enough you’ll even be able to find some old Nortel gear tucked away in a corner and even some (gasp!) Huawei. However, if I had to make a bet, I’d say that the most ubiquitous brand in the core is Cisco, which has always specialised in that segment of telco networking. That’s why it’s not a surprise to hear this morning (courtesy of a Cisco media release) that Vodafone has picked Cisco’s ASR 5500 machine as its mobile multimedia core platform. A few sample pars:
“The Cisco ASR 5500 will be the foundation of VHA’s Evolve Packet Core (EPC). With the ASR 5500’s ability to simplify capacity and traffic management and provide proactive, predictive monitoring and management, VHA gains the increased network efficiency and intelligence required to provide an optimal experience for Vodafone 4G customers. Cisco’s professional services team will also work closely with VHA to help ensure the solution is planned, designed, tested and implemented quickly and efficiently.
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The Cisco ASR 5500 will be the foundation of VHA’s Evolve Packet Core (EPC). With the ASR 5500’s ability to simplify capacity and traffic management and provide proactive, predictive monitoring and management, VHA gains the increased network efficiency and intelligence required to provide an optimal experience for Vodafone 4G customers. Cisco’s professional services team will also work closely with VHA to help ensure the solution is planned, designed, tested and implemented quickly and efficiently.
The Cisco ASR 5500 is the first mobile platform designed to scale to terabit performance and tens of millions of sessions and support the transaction rates required to address the needs of Vodafone’s new 4G network. The capabilities of the Cisco ASR 5500 platform have been developed to address the anticipated increase in performance requirements of next generation networks.
“The Cisco ASR 5500 platform sets a new standard for intelligent performance that redefines the economics of the core network. Together with VHA and Cisco’s professional services teams, the ASR 5500’s massive performance, scale, and flexibility open up new opportunities for VHA to deliver an enhanced mobile experience for Vodafone customers through more highly personalised mobile services,” said Richard Kitts, vice president of Services for the Cisco Asia Pacific, Japan and Greater China region.
VHA joins over 210 other service providers around the world in taking advantage of the flexibility provided by the Cisco ASR 5000 Series platform to meet the dynamic and ever-evolving demands of the mobile Internet. In addition, VHA is implementing the Cisco 7613 mobile security gateway as part of its Enhanced Packet Core solution.”
Of course, the public isn’t privy to how large this deal is, but we’re not betting it to be massive — say a few tens of millions at a maximum. However, it is a nice little slice of business which we’re sure Cisco is very happy to have headed its way. Now if only Vodafone could actually launch that 4G network sometime soon, things would be hunky dory indeed.
Image credit: Cisco
Huh? Didn’t Vodafone just use huawei to upgrade 8000 of its base stations with huawei that was to be used as part of its LTE rollout?
Oh no wait the author doesn’t know what they are doing. This Cisco work is for BACK HAUL network and has nothing to do with the LTE endpoints that huawei have/will be supplying.
Without backhaul the RAN can’t do jack!
I don’t disagree Toby, but the cisco gear is only providing backhaul bandwidth. its not providing anything related to 4G connection/handshake between device and tower, so the title of article is link bait.
Next we’re going to have a article on a AC maker who gets a ‘4G contract’ to supply all the AC units to keep the mobile base stations cool
I believe it also functions as the SGW and PDN making it a core part of the mobile infrastructure for LTE.
Level380:
You’re incorrect. The backhaul is being provided by another vendor.
What Cisco are providing here is the switching capacity “at the other end” of your data connection to your device, so it runs on top of the backhaul, and in tandem with the current 3G packet (data) and circuit (voice) equipment.
So, when you’re device requests a 4G data connection, it’ll be the Cisco box that responds and manages all data to/from your 4G device.
You are correct in saying that it knows nothing about the towers – the Huawei equipment manages that and passes all data packets to the the Cisco equipment in the core of the network. The Cisco box has no idea where you are of what tower you’re talking to – it only cares about what you can/can’t access and what data you’ve requested.
So, as per the title, it is 4G packet core, and is new, so the article is fine.
Ah yes, very good point. I meant core.
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