• Trial undertaken by Telefonica VIVO of Brazil
• First NFV project involving active customers in the residential market
• Aim to evaluate operation efficiency and flexibility

NEC has announced the completion of the first phase of a pre-commercial trial for virtual customer premises equipment (vCPE) for residential users in the network of Telefonica's Brazilian subsidiary VIVO. The trial was conducted with existing customers and deployed in the carrier's own commercial network.

"This trial with Telefonica/VIVO represents the creation of a new technology wave using network virtualisation technology for telecom networks,” said Atsuo Kawamura, SVP at NEC Corporation. “We expect that the virtualisation of network functions will enable Telefonica to raise the efficiency of operations and quicken the development and distribution of new services, thereby allowing customers to enjoy a wide variety of services while promoting convenience and customer satisfaction."

Following the completion of this trial, and according to the evaluation of its results, both companies aim to start commercial implementation of vCPE in Brazil, with additional deployment within the Telefonica Group to follow.

Virtual CPE architecture focuses on home simplification by shifting functions to the carrier's network to enable better diagnostics and more effective troubleshooting, and so also delivering operational benefits. The objective of this world's first vCPE commercial trial is to evaluate operation efficiency and flexibility, in addition to accelerating its time-to-market.

Telefonica is one of the pioneers of NFV technologies. In October 2013, Telefonica and NEC were the first to virtualise consumers' broadband gateways. These gateways provide basic connectivity, acting as a combined access point, switch and modem. All other functionalities, such as IP routing, Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol and Network Address Translation, are provided remotely from the network, running as virtualised network functions (VNFs) on commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) servers. NEC and its Netcracker subsidiary will further provide end-to-end SDN and NFV solutions to help Telefonica promote its virtualisation projects.