Yesterday evening, the renowned Global Telecoms Business (GTB) Innovation Awards were presented in London, which are held to honor the most innovative projects across the world in the fast-moving telecoms industry. In the category "Wireless Network Infrastructure Innovation", Telekom Austria Group´s Serbian subsidiary, Vip mobile, won the prize for their successful demonstration of the first fully virtualized VoLTE stack in a commercial network. The entire core network stack was deployed virtualized, from the virtualized EPC (by Connectem, now Brocade) through the virtualized and Open Source based IMS (by Metaswitch) to the virtualized VoLTE Application Server (by OpenCloud). The partner vendor companies were honored as well.

At yesterday's ceremony, Dejan Kastelic, CTO of Vip mobile, accepted the much-coveted award: "We are proud of this recognition which is proof of our successful NFV strategy. With this deployment in Vip mobile's commercial network, Telekom Austria Group has proved that the technology is ready for prime time, an important puzzle piece for us. As well, Vip mobile being the youngest mobile operator and challenger on the market has shown that is on the top of the technology scale, which will help us to bring our customers an improved experience together with new services that are deployed faster and in a flexible manner. This is proving that we are dedicated to be the leader on the market providing new solutions to customers, vendors and local expert community by setting more advanced standards that will bring us closer to advanced European and world markets".

Alejandro Plater, COO Telekom Austria Group, comments: "We will keep on pushing the NFV strategy forward and thus will contribute a great deal of time and focus on developments regarding this trend. We always seek new opportunities to reshape the innovation landscape both in our local and regional markets. In this way we are directly improving our customers' experience and expectations by introducing more efficient, cost-effective and energy saving solutions that enable faster time to market and flexible service delivery."

Telekom Austria Group previously conducted trials of virtualized network functions individually, however with this project it chose to virtualize the entire core network production chain of a VoLTE service using the live LTE network and VoLTE handsets. The fully virtualized VoLTE stack was set up in the commercial network of VIP mobile in Serbia.

Telekom Austria Group chose to work with a best-of-breed selection of the most innovative vendors in order to produce a fully virtualized VoLTE Stack, running over a live LTE network using VoLTE handsets in a shortest possible time frame (December 3rd 2014 to February 15th 2015). Virtualized EPC was provided by Start-up Connectem, the virtualized IMS was based on Project Clearwater from Metaswitch and the virtualized MMTel AS was OpenCloud's Rhino Sentinel VoLTE product.

NFV has signaled a new optimism within the industry, with the potential of offering huge opportunities to re-engineer and optimize network infrastructure and deliver a better service for our customers. Therefore Telekom Austria Group considers this project an outstanding example of the Group's commitment to innovation, particularly as it succeeded to involve multiple vendors in the core network and all of which provided a fully virtualized stack for VoLTE services. In addition, the project exceeded expectations by achieving deployment two weeks ahead of schedule.

The accomplishment of this world first deployment of a fully virtualized VoLTE service put Telekom Austria Group into a leading position in providing innovative solutions to customers. The Group was supported by vendors who engaged themselves in providing innovative solutions and the Group´s own experts who themselves were highly motivated to deploy such services.

About Global Telecoms Business

Global Telecoms Business magazine (GTB) is the only magazine written specifically for the senior management who run telecoms carriers worldwide. It is a business magazine for business people who manage service providers, providing them with a strategic perspective on the issues that most affect the industry. Each issue of the magazine carries interviews with the industry's leaders - the CEOs, CFOs, CTOs and COOs from the Americas, Europe, the Asia-Pacific and the rest of the world who are daily taking decisions on the future of their companies

distributed by