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Tag: telefonica

  • Openet names Regan marketing development VP for APAC

    Openet names Regan marketing development VP for APAC

    Openet has appointed Tony Regan as vice president of market development for the APAC region, the BSS firm announced earlier this week.

    In his new role, Regan will run Openet’s market development team in APAC, working closely with regional sales VP and sales team to drive the company’s continued expansion in the region, the company said.

    Prior to joining Openet in 2016, Regan held various senior roles within the Telefonica group in Ireland, Spain and Latin America. In his previous role at Openet, Regan ran the company’s consulting division, advising operators on strategy development and execution.

    Regan will be based in Openet’s APAC headquarters in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

    Openet was established in Kuala Lumpur in 2006 and has grown to provide regional service and support, managed services and software development for all of Openet’s APAC customers. The company employs over 180 people in Malaysia.

    Eric Updyke to take helms at Spirent Communications

    Spirent Communications has appointed a new chief executive officer. Eric Updyke, a former Amdocs executive, has started working for the company on April 1, and will take up the CEO role on May 1.

    Updyke will succeed retiring CEO Eric Hutchinson, who will step down on May 1. The company had announced last November that Hutchison planned to retire after 37 years of working for Spirent. He has held the CEO position since being appointed in 2013.

    In a statement, Spirent said Updyke “has extensive experience in international business management with a strong technical understanding of the markets in which Spirent operates.”

    He has worked in various sections of the industry over the last 30 years and has led transformative growth programs on a global scale.

    Updyke joins Spirent from Amdocs, where he most recently served as president of the company’s services group, with responsibility for its managed services, testing and system integration businesses.

    Prior to joining Amdocs, Updyke held executive roles at Nokia Siemens Networks and AT&T.

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  • Blockchain used for inter-carrier settlements in PoC trial

    Blockchain used for inter-carrier settlements in PoC trial

    Members of the International Telecoms Week (ITW) Global Leaders’ Forum (GLF), including PCCW Global and Telstra, have completed a proof of concept trial demonstrating how blockchain technology can transform inter-carrier settlement by streamlining complex transactions.

    The two operators as well as Colt Technology Services, BT, Orange and Telefonica, demonstrated the viability of a platform capable of settling voice transactions between operators within minutes rather than hours.

    The demonstration represents the first proof of concept blockchain trial to involve a multi-lateral series of relationships within the wholesale telecoms sector. It was the latest in a series of trials carried out by CLF members in collaboration with technology partner Clear, a blockchain specialist.

    The proof of concept was able to demonstrate that live data feeds could be successfully input into a distributed ledger, enabling traffic to be automatically verified and settled between two carriers.

    In a statement, the GLF said it is now reviewing its options over a potential governance structure to further develop the technology and implement a solution for the entire industry.

    “This latest PoC signals nothing less than the future of telecoms, whereby intensive manual practices can be securely automated across the wholesale ecosystem,” Colt Technology Services CEO Carl Grivner said.

    “This is a major step forward by Colt and its partners, meaning we can now invest further resources into driving both our and our customers’ businesses forward using the power of blockchain.”

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  • Samsung buys Spanish AI firm Zhilabs in prep for 5G

    Samsung buys Spanish AI firm Zhilabs in prep for 5G

    Samsung Electronics announced that it has acquired Barcelona-based artificial intelligence startup Zhilabs in a bid to further enhance its 5G capabilities.

    Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

    Zhilabs will be fully owned by Samsung, but it will continue to operate independently under its own management, the South Korean vendor said in a statement.

    Zhilabs provides AI-based network and service analytics solutions and its products are used by telecoms carriers including Celcom, Maxis, NTT East, Telenor, O2, Vodafone, TIM, and Telefonica.

    Samsung said AI-based automation will play a central role in the introduction of new services driven by 5G, such as industrial Internet of Things (IoT) and connected cars, as carriers seek to implement new automated solutions and network virtualization features.

    “5G will enable unprecedented services that generate exponentially greater data traffic, for which automated and intelligent network analytics tools are vital,” said Youngky Kim, president and head of networks business at Samsung Electronics.

    “The acquisition of Zhilabs will enable Samsung to help carriers meet these demands to measure and ensure the quality of each subscriber’s service experience.”

    The acquisition of Zhilabs is also part of the company’s pledge, announced in August, to invest 25 trillion won ($22 billion) in AI, 5G, automotive electronics components and biopharmaceuticals technologies.

  • Telefónica selects Huawei to build virtual EPC network in 13 countries

    Telefónica selects Huawei to build virtual EPC network in 13 countries

    Spanish telco Telefónica has contracted Huawei to virtualize its 4G networks in 13 countries as part of its UNICA program.

    The Spanish telco said the two companies are building a large scale virtual Evolved Packet Core (vEPC), an industry-approve framework for providing converged voice and data on 4G LTE networks, in Latin America and Europe.

    The vEPC network will cover 11 countries in Latin America:  Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, México, Colombia, Peru, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala; and two in Europe: Germany and Spain.

    Telefónica will be using Huawei’s vEPC solution, called CloudEPC, that will allow the operator “to build agile networks that quickly scale to match the performance demands of new services”, the companies said in the statement.

    Telefónica and Huawei have been jointly working and testing Huawei CloudEPC performance, in Telefónica’s NFV Reference Lab in Madrid. During the test, Huawei CloudEPC showed one of the best performances in both data and signaling planes by good cloud-formation architecture and by using EPA (Enhanced Platform Awareness) technologies.

    The companies are currently testing the onboarding of the CloudEPC solution over Telefónica´s UNICA infra cloud platform that will allow full automatization of the vEPC deployments and life cycle management within Telefónica networks.

    “This large scale vEPC network deployment is a further step within the Telefónica UNICA virtualization program where a smooth migration to UNICA infra cloud capabilities will be reached following extensive test in Telefónica Lab,” Javier Gavilán, planning and technology director at Telefonica said.

    “These results provide the confidence needed to continue with the adoption and deployment of virtualized solutions and to enable the transformation to software-driven networking.”