Alcatel-Lucent and Mobily Saudi Arabia have announced the deployment of virtualized radio access network (RAN) software from Alcatel-Lucent’s Network Function Virtualization (NFV) portfolio launched during Mobile World Congress 2014.  

Mobily is deploying Alcatel-Lucent’s 9771 Wireless Cloud Element Radio Network Controller (WCE RNC) to improve service performance, reliability, scale and operational efficiency. 

Alcatel-Lucent’s WCE RNC is part of the recently announced suite of Virtualized network functions. Running virtual radio network control functions over open, carrier-grade platforms provides considerable advantages over traditional approaches greatly facilitates advanced RNC requirements for geo-redundancy, near zero downtime maintenance and software upgrades, load balancing, and dynamic reconfiguration.

This new platform underpins Alcatel-Lucent’s virtualized LTE RAN activities which most recently included a proof of concept demonstration with China Mobile at Mobile World Congress 2014.