Orange Polska collaborates with Amdocs on ECOMP Platform

NEW DELHI: Polish telecommunications provider Orange Polska  and Amdocs have announced that they have embarked on the industry’s first project to trial the ECOMP (Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management & Policy) software platform.

This platform is being trialed by Orange Polska, in cooperation with Amdocs as the technology integrator. The objective is to assess ECOMP, initially for virtual services in Poland, and then globally across the Orange footprint (236 million customers in 28 countries).

This is in response to the skyrocketing demand for network capacity and the subsequent need to transform current infrastructures to models based on cloud computing and network function virtualization (NFV) and to progress towards 5G.

"ECOMP offers service providers the ability to design and operate “software-centric” networks running on virtual machines rather than on traditional, physical network architectures. Such networks provide improved scalability and extensive automation, and can adapt faster to customer needs with the quick addition and removal of features. By deploying ECOMP, service providers will gain more control of their network services, drive down operational costs and allow developers to more easily innovate with new network services. Ultimately, consumers benefit because the network will be able to better adapt and scale to meet their needs, as well as predict how to make their connected experiences seamless," a statement said.

AT&T has committed to release ECOMP as open source software, in conjunction with the Linux Foundation. As such, ECOMP has a chance to become a leading standard for the industry.

“Virtualisation of the network is an inevitable process. 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,” – said Piotr Muszyński, Orange Polska Vice-President in charge of Strategy and Transformation.

Orange Polska is conducting numerous tests with Amdocs to support the preparation and creation of a set of innovative virtual Customer Premises Equipment (vCPE) services for residential customers. A significant part of the vCPE features will be moved to a cloud environment and managed by the ECOMP platform. The tests will validate the capabilities and potential benefits of an ECOMP deployment within the Orange network.

“Amdocs brings unique expertise to early day ECOMP projects like ours because of their early involvement and commitment to AT&T’s ECOMP project: They participated in the development of the platform and they have a deep understanding of how to onboard network services and functions with ECOMP,," said Alain Maloberti, Senior Vice-President in charge of Orange Labs Networks.

Amdocs’ support is an opportunity for Orange to gain experience in building and integrating next-generation solutions using ECOMP. Orange will leverage this project to capture the impact on jobs and processes, and understand how ECOMP can facilitate activities of network designers, engineers and operators. Moreover, this project will help Orange understand how ECOMP can reduce the time it takes to introduce new NFV technologies and services.

“Always an innovator, Orange was the first service provider to join AT&T in its efforts to standardise NFV and SDN platforms and we are excited to be their partner in integrating open source ECOMP for the first time into a live cloud environment and demonstrating the first of many NFV applications,” – said Anthony Goonetilleke, President of the Amdocs Product Business Group.