Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) recently joined hands with Etisalat Group to install its virtualized radio access network (‘vRAN’) controller in the latter’s access network across the United Arab Emirates and Sri Lanka. Encouragingly, shares of Alcatel-Lucent rose around 2% during the regular trading session on Jan 20 on the NYSE, following this news. The collaboration will enable Alcatel-Lucent to boost industry development of network functions virtualization (‘NFV’).
For Etisalat, the collaboration with Alcatel-Lucent for this inter-country vRAN controller deployment will help it to efficiently cater to the increasing demand for high bandwidth services and applications among the subscribers.
As per Etisalat’s network modernization program, Alcatel-Lucent will first deploy the 9771 Wireless Cloud Element (‘WCE’) Radio Network Controller in Etisalat’s network in United Arab Emirates and after that in Sri Lanka during this year. As a matter of fact, Etisalat is one of the leading telecom operators in the Middle East, Africa and Asia and is the first operator to set up WCE platform in Mobily’s Saudi Arabia network.
Notably, Alcatel-Lucent is a leader in NFV and has contributed to more than 65 customer virtualization projects. It also possesses expertise in the development of its CloudBand 2.0 NFV platform and Nuage Networks SDN capabilities over a five-year period.
Moreover, to further enhance its NFV-based wireless control deployment in key markets, Alcatel-Lucent is uniting with several industry giants such as Intel Corp. (INTC) apart from its involvement in the ETSI NFV advisory board. Also, along with the vRAN controller, Alcatel-Lucent is bringing in the virtualization of extensive network functions’ range to address networking solutions demand. This comprises virtualized IMS (‘vIMS’), service routing (‘VSR’), Content Delivery Network (‘vCDN’) and evolved packet core (‘vEPC’).
Alcatel-Lucent currently carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). A couple of better-ranked stocks that can be considered are 8×8 Inc. (EGHT) and Corning Inc. (GLW), both sporting the same rank as Alcatel-Lucent.
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