HP Enterprise and China Telecom launch NFV lab

Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) has opened a joint network functions virtualization (NFV) lab in Beijing in collaboration with China Telecom Beijing Research Institute.

The new laboratory will help China Telecom plan for the implementation of NFV technologies and accelerate the development of new offerings for customers.

It will utilize HPE's OpenNFV infrastructure stack and reference architecture and provide support from the vendor's NFV technical experts.

China Telecom will be able to use the lab to explore the benefits of embracing NFV and software defined networking (SDN) technologies over telecom networks.

HPE will help the operator test performance of virtualized functions over its HPE Helion OpenStack Carrier Grade open cloud platform, which is designed to meet network operators' increasing reliability requirements.

“We believe that integration of NFV within SDN-enabled infrastructure will be the next stage of evolution for the strategic development of the China Telecom network,” China Telecom Beijing Research Institute president Li Zhigang said.

“We hope that our collaborative efforts with HPE will result in the creation of NFV solutions which meet our needs and advance the transformation of our networks.”

China Telecom is the second largest of China's three major telecom operators behind China Mobile.