China Mobile Hong Kong Partners with Huawei to Migrate services to NFV cloud core network

China Mobile Hong Kong (CMHK), a subsidiary of China Mobile, which serves around 850 million mobile subscribers in China, including 535,000 4G subscriptions, announced that in partnership with Huawei it has migrated services to a commercial NFV-based cloud core network.

CMHK claims that it has become the first mobile operator in Hong Kong to cloudify its core network. For the project CMHK deployed a 3GPP system that supports services for more than 20 network systems, including IP multimedia subsystem (IMS), evolved packet core (EPC), Diameter routing agent/mobile number portability (DRA/MNP), home subscriber server/home location register (HSS/HLR) and mobile switching centre-server (MSC-S).

The new network architecture delivered by Huawei is designed to both help maximise return on investment and improve operational and maintenance efficiency and provide a path toward 5G as part of the Network 2020 vision.

Previously, in November 2016 CMHK and Huawei jointly announced that CMHK has achieved a 4.5G mobile network milestone and that the operator had rolled out major network enhancements to enhance service performance and coverage during the year. CMHK and Huawei also completed a live demonstration of a 2.3GHz TDD massive MIMO solution and achieved a TDD + FDD 1 Gbit/s download speed.

In January 2017, CMHK launched a home broadband service providing bandwidth options of from 100 Mbit/s up to 1 Gbit/s.

Regarding the upgrade, Wang Yongde, VP of Huawei's cloud core network product line, commented, "On CMHK's cloud network, network elements IMS, packet switched and circuit switched domains are co-deployed... (and) VoLTE, VoWiFi and mobile data services are co-operated... CMHK and Huawei are jointly developing new technologies such as network slicing and edge computing for the transformation to cloud networks".

http://www.huawei.com/en/news/2017/2/Cloud-Era-HK-New-Cloud-Core-Network