Three UK Test New “world first” Fully Cloud-Based Core Network

Mobile operator Three UK has announced that they’ve begun working with Nokia to test a new software-based cloud core network, which they say is a “world first“. This will be used to support the forthcoming roll-out of their next generation 5G services (mobile broadband and fixed wireless).

Apparently this new core network has already been connected to all mast sites (achieved in December 2018) and as a result every customer should be able to “enjoy the benefits” when it goes live after testing is complete. The hope is that this will make their network easier to manage (particularly for capacity) and more cost effective, which in turn could deliver better data speeds, reliability and security.

At present the trial is restricted to Three’s own staff, although the plan is to make it available to the rest of their customers’ sometime later this year. In keeping with this change they’ve also been busy upgrading their data centres and fibre optic links, which is partly thanks to last year’s deal with SSE Enterprise Telecoms (here and here).

Statement from Three

To achieve the latency needed for some 5G applications we are moving our network closer to our customers. Instead of having three data centres based around the London and Midlands areas, we now have 21 data centres spread from as far North as Edinburgh to Portsmouth in the South.

All of these data centres have been connected up with fibre to ensure that they are able to carry traffic from our mast sites into the core network and back out to our customers again as fast as possible. This needs to happen in milliseconds so our customers can snap, stream and post Instagram stories to their heart’s content.

Additional benefits of the new data centres include:

* Lower latency – Faster reaction time on the network – perfect for gaming on our 5G network.

* Higher capacity – Our customers already use 3.5x more data than other UK networks.

* Unlimited capacity – The data centres are managed by an external provider meaning that as traffic on our network grows, we can just add to the space we use in the data centres. That means better reliability and management of our network.

End.