Korea's SK Telecom announced that it has commercialised T-MANO, an NFV MANO (network functions virtualisation management and orchestration) platform that performs integrated management and orchestration of virtualised network equipment and software.
SK Telecom noted that NFV MANO, also termed MANO, provides an architectural framework for managing and orchestrating virtualised network functions (VNFs) and other software components. The new T-MANO solution has been optimised to SK Telecom's network environment, and is based on the ETSI specifications that define the MANO architecture to facilitate the deployment and connection of services as they are decoupled from dedicated physical devices and moved on to virtual machines (VMs).
Prior to the development of T-MANO, SK Telecom stated that it was necessary to develop, build and operate a separate NFV management platform for each network equipment provider due to the fact that each piece of NFV equipment was based on different specifications, depending on the manufacturer.
Leveraging T-MANO, SK Telecom is able to more efficiently utilise its virtualised network equipment by managing service quality and data traffic in an integrated manner, regardless of equipment manufacturer, while improving the overall service quality through responding flexibly to service failures and errors.
The solution also enables the company to significantly reduce the time required to set up new equipment and provide a new service as it can upgrade the whole system at once, as opposed to upgrading each system separately as was necessary previously.
SK Telecom intends to leverage T-MANO to expand the telecommunications infrastructure ecosystem by opening up the APIs of T-MANO so that the industry can use it to build virtualised network equipment or software.
The company will first apply T-MANO to its virtualised VoLTE (HD Voice) routers, and then plans to expand its application to the virtualised LTE evolved packet core (EPC) and additional equipment including MMS Servers. SK Telecom stated that in 2017, virtualised EPC will account for around 80% of newly-deployed EPC equipment, while from 2019 it intends to deploy only virtualised EPC solutions.
In the field of NFV, SK Telecom has also commercialised an international standards-based NFV system orchestrator, named T OVEN, that was unveiled in 2015, and applied NFV technology to its base station equipment in September 2016.
