The Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company, du, announced that it has successfully completed customer premises equipment virtualisations trials in the UAE. When commercially rolled-out in future, CPE virtualisation is expected to provide an enhanced service whilst optimising OPEX and CAPEX costs for residential and enterprise customer in addition will equip du to offer these services within a much shorter time frame.

Virtualised CPE (vCPE) technology offer the ability to service providers to lower the cost of end premises equipment and reduces the complexity of these devices while hosting the complicated services in the du cloud. The vCPE trials reiterates du 's position as a market innovator and a provider that wants to have services which disrupt the market in consumer and enterprise data communication space. This permits du to offer a "plug & play" solution for the anticipated demand for virtualised solutions in future, making service activation achievable in matter of few hours. The service simplifies the provision of Software Defined Networking (SDN) driven service.

Jasim AlAwadi, Vice President - Network Infrastructure & Services, du , said: "We are delighted to be the first in the region to successfully complete the trials of this promising new technology. Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) - and in particular vCPE is an exciting emerging new growth area in our existing portfolio and is critical to our future of consumer and enterprise growth plans and potentially introduce du to the OTT market, which will entail that du can provide its services over other service providers infrastructure like Google and Amazon. The introduction will give us the ability to provide multiple services over a virtual network. This is takes du a step closer to an application aware of network"

vCPE seamlessly extends the benefits of a programmable network and application aware abstraction to branch locations and homes, paving the way for a dynamic and more responsive operational environment. With this technology CPE costs will lower and the service provider will have the ability to offer a wider variety of services through a customer portal, which in turn improves customer experience. All the services required by residential or Enterprise customers will be ordered online and pushed seamlessly to the customer.

SDN with NFV seamlessly extends the benefits of policy-driven network automation and application-friendly abstraction to branch locations, paving the way for a dramatically more responsive operational environment. Virtualisation speeds up the deployment of new sites by a factor of ten, while reducing operational expenditures by over fifty percent.
Source: WAM