Alcatel-Lucent and Mobily Saudi Arabia have announced the deployment of virtualized radio access network (RAN) software from Alcatel-Lucent’s Network Function Virtualization (NFV), which appeared during the Mobile World Congress 2014, Lteworld.org reports, and goes on to explain that Mobily is using Alcatel-Lucent’s 9771 Wireless Cloud Element Radio Network Controller (WCE RNC) to improve performance, reliability, and efficiency.

The WCE RNC is part of a recently announced suite of Virtualized network functions. By running virtual radio network control functions over open, carrier-grade platforms, there are considerable advantages over traditional approaches, with improved RNC requirements for geo-redundancy, near zero downtime for maintenance and software upgrades, load balancing, and dynamic reconfiguration.