Working Group Two Introduces Cloud-Managed Mobile Network with Cisco Ultra Packet Core on AWS

Mobile World Congress — Working Group Two (WG2) announced an industry-leading platform to offer cloud-managed mobile network, running both control and user plane on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Focusing on the demands and opportunities of the 5G era – the WG2 platform allows mobile operators and enterprises to create and monetize a new breed of business and consumer mobile services that control the network through a simple cloud-based API.

Creating new and differentiated mobile services today is very challenging because it requires deep and complex integration into the mobile network. Evolution towards 5G will require a much higher velocity of services creation and new monetization models.

WG2, a Telenor technology innovation, addresses this industry challenge the “Internet way” with a re-built, multi-tenant, cloud-native mobile core and API-based programmability for developers. This approach helps to radically reduce the cost and complexity of creating new products and services for operators. Delivered as a service, the platform includes voice, messaging, data and authentication infrastructure.

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The WG2 platform includes Cisco’s virtualized Ultra Packet Core, delivering 2G/3G/4G/5G mobile services, hosted on AWS. The broad set of infrastructure services and geographic footprint offered by the AWS cloud enables WG2 to offer its services to operators on a global basis with industry leading security, redundancy and reliability delivered as a utility: on-demand and available in seconds. WG2’s API of mobile network functions were designed to allow application developers to create new mobile-based business and consumer apps on the cloud.

“WG2 believes that AWS infrastructure and Cisco packet core can provide enhanced scalability, security, and redundancy. Working with AWS gives us agility and execution speed – capabilities we believe are becoming more important than the scale and size of the team. While still early on our journey, we have proven that the speed of development, cost and pace of innovation is radically better than if we had taken traditional technology choices,” said Erlend Prestgard, CEO, Working Group Two.

“WG2 enables service providers to maximize their network investments by offering new revenue streams at lower costs, with lower risk. The collaboration between WG2, AWS, Cisco, and Telenor is designed to unlock the promises of network transformation and differentiated user experience,” said Jonathan Davidson, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Service Provider Business, Cisco.

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“Telenor is proud to have incubated WG2 in the early phases of the project and is excited to follow WG2’s journey both as a customer, partner and an investor. WG2’s ability to leverage cloud infrastructure has impacted our own strategic thinking and technology transformation. As their first customer, we can see how small and agile teams can achieve impressive output when leveraging cloud infrastructure. We look forward to how this collaboration can create an innovation velocity, challenging traditional industry standards,” said Ruza Sabanovic, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Telenor Group.

“WG2’s cloud platform including Cisco’s virtualized packet core represents a next generation architecture for mobile network operators to provide superior flexibility, scalability, and performance over traditional hardware-based networks. Today, operators across the world are transforming their infrastructure to leverage dynamic cloud scalability for both the control and user plane. This will serve as the foundation for high speed low latency networks, enabling an accelerated ability to deliver new innovative applications for end customers and cost effectively scale their network,” said, Jean-Philippe Poirault, Head of AWS Telecom, Amazon Web Services, Inc.

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