Telenor and Cisco are expanding their partnership to include security, 5G, Open vRAN, B2B expansion, distributed cloud and furthering Telenor Group’s digital transformation to support its flexible working hours approach.
The companies have started an Open vRAN trial at Telenor headquarters in Norway to further investigate using a virtualized, open infrastructure to improve cost efficiency for service rollouts.
Cisco and Telenor also announced a new round of financing of the joint venture, WG2. WG2 offers a carrier grade, cloud-native mobile core solution that enables rapid service innovation for mobile network operators (MNOs), mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) and enterprises. Using open APIs and cross-network interoperability, WG2 radically transforms the ability of mobile operators to innovate quickly. The new financing will be used to accelerate WG2’s growth in Europe, North America and Asia, and to extend its innovative solutions in 5G, IoT and private networks.
“The cooperation with Cisco over the years has delivered great results for both companies, especially within the area of security and mobility,” said Sigve Brekke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Telenor. “Our partnership in WG2 builds towards a future where programmable networks are the key to creating value for 5G, IoT and private networks. Ongoing developments in our agreement with Cisco continue to be forward leaning, addressing the most innovative and in-demand transformation topics in our industry.”
Working Group Two targets wholesale, cloud-managed mobile network on AWS
Working Group Two (WG2), which is a new venture backed by Telenor Group and Digital Alpha (a financial fund supported by Cisco) announced a wholesale cloud-managed mobile network platform that will run both control and user plane on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The WG2 platform includes Cisco’s virtualized Ultra Packet Core, delivering 2G/3G/4G/5G mobile services, hosted on AWS.
WG2 said its platform allows mobile operators and enterprises to create and monetize a new breed of business and consumer mobile services that control the network through a simple cloud-based API.
“WG2 believes that AWS infrastructure and Cisco packet core can provide enhanced scalability, security, and redundancy. Working with AWS gives us agility and execution speed – capabilities we believe are becoming more important than the scale and size of the team. While still early on our journey, we have proven that the speed of development, cost and pace of innovation is radically better than if we had taken traditional technology choices,” said Erlend Prestgard, CEO, Working Group Two.
“WG2’s cloud platform including Cisco’s virtualized packet core represents a next generation architecture for mobile network operators to provide superior flexibility, scalability, and performance over traditional hardware-based networks. Today, operators across the world are transforming their infrastructure to leverage dynamic cloud scalability for both the control and user plane. This will serve as the foundation for high speed low latency networks, enabling an accelerated ability to deliver new innovative applications for end customers and cost effectively scale their network,” said, Jean-Philippe Poirault, Head of AWS Telecom, Amazon Web Services, Inc.
