1-year deals valued at $1.3B; include NFV, SDN and cloud support
Alcatel-Lucent signed a pair of contracts with China’s largest mobile operators to support the rollout of network functions virtualization, software-defined networking and cloud technology.
The one-year deals are valued at $727 million with China Mobile and $576 million with China Unicom. The agreements call for Alcatel-Lucent to provide its mobile and fixed “ultra-broadband access,” IP routing, optical networking, NFV capabilities and SDN technology from its Nuage Networks division.
The deployments are targeted at meeting the country’s “Broadband China” initiative that is geared towards providing full broadband coverage across the country’s rural and urban areas by 2020. The initiative includes targets of 100 megabit-per-second fiber to all municipalities, city districts and most non-urban households by 2017; 30 Mbps average Internet speeds available in major cities; 80% of “administrative villages” to have fiber coverage; and full “4G” mobile access in urban and rural areas.
To meet that demand, Alcatel-Lucent said it will provide TDD-LTE and FDD-LTE equipment; gigabit passive optical networks and Ethernet passive optical network equipment for fixed broadband access; optical transport network and private telecommunications network data transmission equipment; IP routing and switching technologies; voice over LTE support; NFV cloud technologies; and Nuage Networks’ SDN platform.
Alcatel-Lucent launched the Nuage Networks division in early 2013, with a goal of focusing on SDN solutions for healthcare, banking, utilities and other enterprise verticals, as well as large Internet-based companies and telecom service providers. Nuage has since scored several SDN-related deals, including the deployment of its Virtualized Services Platform inside data centers run by Europe-based hosting provider OVH.
Alcatel-Lucent also continues to expand its NFV presence through its CloudBand Ecosystem Program, which it launched in late 2013. Members include Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica and Hewlett-Packard.
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