Metaswitch says that Tiscali is using its technology to seed its long-term push to NFV. Metaswitch’s Clearwater core is an implementation of IMS virtualised for use in the cloud. As well as being highly programmable and manageable it has one huge advantage - it radically reduces the cost of deploying carrier services in an IP environment.

Metaswitch calculates that its Clearwater Core could enable a telco (or ISP in this case) to support tens of thousands of IP voice and messaging users for just a few cents a year per person.

While much of the industry focus around NFV has been on the big ‘usual suspect’ carriers who have indeed been pushing for an NFV industry focus as a way to increase their agility and drop capital and operational costs often explicitly to compete with the OTTs.

But, as we’d always expected, the first players to implement NFV look like being the challenger telcos and OTT players themselves, in this case. Tiscali, which bubbled up in the late 1990s to be a big European ISP player, is now an Italian ISP with around half a million DSL and dial customers.

Tiscali says it’s aiming the technology at its Indoona over-the-top (OTT) application which “gives users access to a unique social network designed for smartphones. It allows users to publish posts up to 3,000 characters, share photos, audio or video files and much more. The application offers users 100 minutes per month of free calls to Western Europe, Canada, China and the U.S.”

Metaswitch says that “Tiscali’s adoption of Clearwater Core helps validate Metaswitch’s “software telco” strategy, which asserts that communications networks are transitioning to a cloud-based, software-centric, all-IP future. Clearwater Core provides the first cost-effective foundation for carrier-based SIP services and it can be instantiated, scaled up and scaled down within seconds, as demanded by service utilization or application loads.”

View Martin Talyor, CTO of Metaswitch Networks in conversation with Martyn Warwick and Ian Scales on the subject of NFV below.