Turkcell has added a new partnership to its 5G technologies development programme.
Following the launch of several strategic alliances with Turkish and international technology companies and universities aimed at furthering the development of 5G technologies, the successful integration of Netsia’s Virtual LTE RAN Platform into Turkcell’s Network Labs located in Istanbul has been completed.
According to Turkcell, RAN slicing constitutes the cornerstone of any end-to-end slicing initiative, as radio resources are ultimately the basic building blocks to be shared (or sliced) among users.
Netsia and Turkcell have worked towards integrating Netsia’s platform into Turkcell’s Labs, reproducing a private LTE network with the ability to be sub-divided into multiple slices which, at RAN level, can offer different performances, latencies, and radio resources to different sets of customers.
The result of such integration demonstrates that SDN/NFV techniques can be successfully applied to the RAN, hence completing the last piece of the puzzle towards an effective end-to-end network slicing.
“5G technology will be vital to every field. That's why I think that 5G technology offers Turkey one of the best opportunities to take a leap forward in the next 10 years. At Turkcell, we are cooperating with the best companies and universities both in the global sphere and in our own country, to ensure that Turkey becomes a nation that has the ability to produce its own technologies and store and processes its own data. We aim to be a pioneer in the establishment of 5G standards and in making the technology available in our country. This is why we partnered with Netsia,” explained Gediz Sezgin, Turkcell's Executive Vice President Network Technologies.
“The integration of Netsia’s Virtual LTE RAN Platform into a commercial LTE core in our Labs is an important step forward to demonstrate that an end-to-end network slicing for 5G networks is possible, from the core to the RAN, and how it can be applied to specific service environments, like that of a virtual Private LTE network.”
