Orange Group and AT&T agreed to test ECOMP platform last year.
Orange Polska, the Polish subsidiary of French telecom group Orange, and Amdocs, a provider of digital customer experience solutions, announced a project to trial AT&T’s enhanced control, orchestration, management and policy software platform.
The platform is currently being trialed by Orange Polska in cooperation with Amdocs as the technology integrator. The main goal of the trial is to assess ECOMP, initially for virtual services in Poland and then globally across the Orange footprint.
The move is said to be in response to the increasing demand for network capacity and the subsequent need to transform current infrastructure to models based on cloud computing and network functions virtualization and to progress towards “5G,” the companies said in a joint statement.
ECOMP is designed to offer service providers the ability to construct and operate software-centric networks running on virtual machines rather than on traditional, physical network architectures. The software-centric networks are said to provide improved scalability and extensive automation.
“Virtualization of the network is an inevitable process,” explained Piotr Muszyński, VP in charge of strategy and transformation at Orange Polska. “By testing ECOMP at Orange Polska, we are preparing ourselves to become a software-driven company. In the future, these cutting-edge technologies will give customers completely new possibilities, such as the ability to self-activate and deactivate services, or to enjoy flexible rating based on the time they consumed the service. The operator, on the other hand, will receive tools that allow real-time adaptation to meet the customer needs.”
AT&T initially unveiled the ECOMP initiative in March 2016. The carrier said one of the goals for ECOMP is to provide for the design, creation and lifecycle management of VNFs in a flexible, dynamic, policy driven manner allowing users to dynamically control ECOMP’s behavior without changing the system software.
In September 2016, Orange announced plans to test the ECOMP platform. The French telecoms group was the first carrier to join AT&T’s ECOMP effort, with the U.S carrier saying it expects additional carriers to test and adopt the platform.
