Huawei has hailed the “world’s first” migration of a VoLTE network, describing the project with HKT as “most complex and difficult phase” of the operator’s merger with CSL.
The vendor said it achieved lossless migration of the 2G, 3G and LTE core networks, including data sessions of millions of subscribers. This migration included VoLTE and CSFB services, as well as signalling.
HKT bought rival CSL in 2013, giving it a 40 percent of the Hong Kong mobile market. The operator has worked closely with Huawei to ensure both networks were integrated without damaging customer experience.
Huawei held proof of concept tests to ensure the planned migration would work and used provisioning systems to merge both networks without any loss in connectivity.
Wang Yongde, Vice President of Huawei’s Core Network Product Line, said: “The network migration project required the convergence of packet switched, circuit switched and, most notably, IMS domains. The huge amount of data involved and the tight timeframe made network migration extremely challenging.
“Huawei is proud to have participated in the seamless migration of 2G/3G/4G networks to the new core network for HKT, fully demonstrating our strengths, especially in the VoLTE field.”
In May 2014, HKT became the first operator in Hong Kong to launch VoLTE commercially. In April last year, the operator worked with Huawei to launch three carrier aggregation commercially, another first in the country.