Sprint reveals achievements from its NFV investment

Sprint NFV networkGunther Ottendorfer, chief operating officer of technology at Sprint, has revealed key achievements from its Network Function Virtualization (NFV) investment.

Sprint’s NFV strategy is to utilize new technology providers in areas starting with the SBC (Session Border Controller), the Call Session Control Function (CSCF), and the Telephony Application Server (TAS) functionality.

“These services will enable our customers to do more with the devices they depend on at home, at work and on the go, while reducing our infrastructure and operating costs,” Gunther Ottendorfer said in a blog post.

Sprint relies on Metaswitch for the SBC, CSCF, and the Breakout Gateway Control Function (BGCF). Mavenir is the technology partner of Sprint for the TAS, Media Resource Function (MRF), and policy Diameter Routing Agent (pDRA).

Sprint has virtualized its messaging platforms in the network and started migrating Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) and Short Message Service (SMS) functions over to NFV platform. Sprint has virtualized 100 percent of IP Short Message (IPSM) traffic.

Sprint was tied for #1 in text messaging due in large part to IPSM supporting IP based text messaging over LTE. Sprint is also migrating SMS traffic to NFV. Sprint aims to fully virtualize SMS by the end of 2017. Sprint will deploy the MMS VNF onto the virtual platform during the first half of 2018.

Sprint will be able to scale the Core up or down dynamically to support new 5G services, depending upon demand by virtualizing the EPC and IMS onto a single NFVI.

“Now is the right time to leverage the benefits of NFV, as we evolve towards Gigabit LTE and 5G. We expect that the strengths of NFV and ecosystem will afford Sprint flexibility, greater efficiencies, and more agility in terms of innovation,” Gunther Ottendorfer said.

Sprint and Metaswitch are looking to provide quality and sophisticated communication services that are native to the mobile phone dialer. This combination will offer users a more intuitive, reliable and collaborative experience than is typically available from third party applications that ride on top of a standard mobile data plan.

Metaswitch’s cloud technology provides agile and cost-efficient innovation platform for LTE and 5G networks.

Two years ago, Sprint started creating and deploying common infrastructure in more than 30 data centers around the network. “We will cap our expansion on legacy core network hardware, while growing new functionality and capacity on our virtualized platform,” Gunther Ottendorfer said.

Sprint is building out a new virtual Core – replacing stand-alone, bare metal platforms with a single Network Function Virtualization infrastructure (NFVI) on which all of the Evolved Packet Core (EPC) and IP Multimedia Sub-System (IMS) platforms virtually reside as Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs).