Turkcell picks Mavenir for 5G-ready voice services

Mavenir has succeeded Implemented one of the largest fully cloud-native IMS systems in Europe, Middle East and Africa. Implementation for Turkcell in Turkey 5G-ready voice services with Mavenir's cloud-native IMS and has successfully migrated all voice traffic of 11 million VoLTE-enabled customers.

The additional capacity will also enable Turkcell to drive further growth. An expansion to 24 million 4G users is planned for a total of 38 million customers.

Mavenir's cloud-native IMS solution consists of a microservices-based architecture purpose-built for fully automated cloud environments and is deployed on Turkcell's next-generation Unified Telco Cloud. Thanks to the microservices architecture, operators can use the same IMS core for VoLTE and 5G voice services and deploy new services faster and more efficiently. The solution can also be combined with Mavenir's Rich Communications Services to offer customers advanced and compatible messaging services that counter OTT apps. Mavenir is the world leader in VoLTE IMS 1and a leading provider of voice and messaging services with over 11 billion messages transmitted per day.

Using microservices, an operator can more easily extend and scale a service, as evidenced by the rapid growth in the number of VoLTE-enabled subscribers supported by Turkcell. The ability to run a large number of virtual machines also improves reliability and resilience, as there is no central point of failure. The software-centric approach also increases operator agility: The development, testing and deployment cycles are significantly shorter compared to older infrastructures based on proprietary hardware.

The unique benefit of the scalability of Mavenir's cloud-native IMS was demonstrated when Turkcell deployed it. In Turkey, families like to gather during the national Bayram holiday. Telecommunications-related data traffic can also increase so much that there are occasional failures. Due to the pandemic, a lockdown was announced shortly before the extended Bayram holidays in May and July 2021. As a result, traffic at peak times during the holiday season will double, according to Turkcell's forecast. Thanks to the scalability of the solution, Mavenir was able to double network capacity within days of the government's announcement of the lockdown. Data traffic increased by leaps and bounds, but there were no outages.

dr Gediz Sezgin, Turkcell's Chief Technology Officer, stated, “ Our unified telco cloud and virtualized mobile core are the foundations of Turkcell's claim to be the first to offer our customers industry-leading services. The virtualized IMS was a key milestone in the network transformation on our journey to NFV and our roadmap towards 5G. With its software-centric approach to any cloud, Mavenir is a valuable partner.”

BG Kumar, President of Mavenir's Communication Services Business Group , said: " Based on our experience with Turkcell, we know that supporting both VoLTE and Voice over New Radio (VoNR) on a common IMS core will help operators plan." the rollout of 5G will ease the transition. The cloud-native virtualized IMS ensures continuity of voice services that may be neglected in the rapid transition to 5G.”

Mavenir and the Turkcell Group share a deep and multifaceted partnership. In addition to the live deployment in Turkey, vIMS is also deployed at Turkcell subsidiary Lifecell in Ukraine, while planning for deployment at group companies BeST and KKTCell in Belarus and Cyprus, respectively, is underway.

In Turkey, Mavenir also provides Rich Communication Services and RCS Business Messaging, a Dynamic Routing Solution and collaborates on the world's first fully containerized Open-RAN call over an O-RAN Split 7.2 architecture on Turkcell's telecom cloud.