Telefonica trials NFV service chaining for enterprises

• Proof of Concept with Nuage Networks
• Virtualised services platform in VMware environment
• Integration with IP edge routing
• Telefonica also announced Q3 financial results

SDN specialists Nuage Networks has been working with Telefónica Business Solutions on the evaluation and testing of service chaining of virtualized network functions (NFV) in a multi-vendor SDN environment. The two companies have announced that their tests are now complete and that Telefónica will move on from this proof of concept toward automating delivery of value-added services and improving time to market in serving its enterprise customers.

Service chaining makes it possible to automatically insert physical or virtual network service appliances with the appropriate configurations and policies as part of cloud-based solutions.

Nuage Networks’ virtualised services platform (VSP) provides the automated overlay networking for Telefónica’s existing VMware virtualisation environment, as well as a test environment based on OpenStack and the open source Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor. The solution includes a service chaining portal to allow fully automated instantiation of virtual machines through OpenStack and third-party APIs.

The two companies also demonstrated seamless integration with Telefónica’s existing third-party IP Edge Routing platforms in the roles of Datacenter Gateway and Datacenter Provider Edge, including integration between the automated value-added applications in the data centre and WAN connectivity services. The hybrid solution should provide Telefónica’s enterprise customers with the flexibility to make use of automated value-added services and an optimal WAN service depending on their specific requirements needs for bandwidth, control, cost and quality of service.

Meanwhile, Telefónica announced its third quarter results this morning, showing group revenues up 10.8 per cent year-on-year to €11.9bn, although net income fell 1.9 per cent to €884m. The number of fixed telephony customers rose 12.5 per cent to 39.98m, broadband customers rose 18.7 per cent to 20.95m (of which 5.83m were fibre), and mobile customers rose 11.6 per cent to 251.38m – two thirds of which were prepay. It also reported a 28 per cent year-on-year rise in M2M connections, which now stands at 8.77m.

"Third quarter results reflected further acceleration in organic growth figures derived from increased commercial momentum, mainly in high-value products and services", said César Alierta, Executive Chairman of Telefónica, who also chose to emphasise the better performance of the Spanish business, "which returned to year-on-year revenue growth after 7 years of intense business transformation", and that it "represents an improvement of commercial activity in virtually all services".