A new MoU between Alcatel-Lucent and Telefonica will see the companies test additional NFV technologies, focusing on boosting network performance and efficiency.

The latest deal builds on a February 2014 agreement between the two firms under which Telefonica agreed to use the network vendor’s Cloudband platform for NFV implementation.

Cloudband is a NFV management and orchestration platform for operators.

The duo will now investigate how mobile networks can be changed to meet future demands generated by IoT, M2M and increased customer connectivity.

The firms’ announcement also references Telefonica’s recent testing of Alcatel-Lucent’s virtualised service router in its NFC Reference Lab, using the OpenMano NFV Reference Lab.

“The results delivered were outstanding, reaching 100% line-rate performance which allowed data to be transported with zero losses,” said the vendor.

They will continue to test other elements of Alcatel-Lucent’s NFV portfolio in the coming months.