Alcatel-Lucent announced its deal with Telefonica to test NFV (network functions virtualization) technologies.

The NFV trial is aimed at enhancing network performance and efficiencies to support growing demand for flexible connectivity.

Earlier, Alcatel-Lucent announced a major NFV and SDN deal with China Mobile and China Unicom.

Telefonica has already tested Alcatel-Lucent’s Virtualized Service Router in its NFV Reference Lab using the OpenMANO NFV orchestration stack – delivering 100 percent line-rate performance which allowed data to be transported with zero losses.
The companies will continue testing other elements of Alcatel-Lucent’s NFV portfolio in the coming months.

Enrique Blanco, global CTO of Telefonica, said: “We have already seen an outstanding performance in the testing of Alcatel-Lucent’s VSR, showing that it delivers comparable performance to hardware-based routers. Use of these technologies will open up new opportunities as we continue innovating to exceed our customer’s expectations.”

In February 2014, Alcatel-Lucent and Telefonica announced the application of Alcatel-Lucent’s CloudBand platform to advance NFV implementation.

Alcatel-Lucent and Telefonica will now investigate how mobile networks can be transformed to meet demands being placed on them by the Internet of Things, machine-to-machine communications and increased customer connectivity.

Alcatel-Lucent, which will be part of Nokia Networks, claims that 30 customer projects have used the CloudBand NFV platform via its CloudBand Ecosystem Program that has over 60 members.

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