As part of its continuous drive to enhance end-user experience, Zain Saudi Arabia announced with Huawei Tech Investment Saudi Arabia, the successful launch of a first-of-its-kind commercial NFV (Network Functions Virtualization)-based IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) network this year.

By virtualizing the IMS Core, Zain Saudi Arabia takes a significant step forward towards building a carrier grade Core cloud platform. This move comes as part of Zain Saudi Arabia’s commitment towards meeting the growing demands and high expectations of its customers, in addition to expediting the rollout of service, while maintaining a cost-effective network.

By using Huawei’s NFV architecture, Zain Saudi Arabia is able to provide a lower cost and more agile deployment platform for existing IMS services, and improves business models to the extent that NFV could ultimately be a key differentiator in a very competitive market.

Eng. Sultan Abdulaziz Al-Deghaither, Chief Technology Officer in Zain Saudi Arabia said “This technical breakthrough will enable Zain Saudi Arabia to have a platform for innovation and rapid service introduction. Zain Saudi Arabia customers and business users will enjoy more flexible and easy-to-use communication services natively integrated on a multitude of devices. With the introduction of virtual IMS, Zain Saudi Arabia users will experience fast call setup time and HD voice quality”.

Last week, Zain Saudi Arabia and Huawei have signed two Memorandum of Understanding, On the sidelines of the Mobile World Congress 2017 in Barcelona, which will see them collaborate on a number of technologies and services in a bid to further develop the operator’s ICT offering and ultimately contribute to the Kingdom’s digital transformation program.