Telefonica Hispanoamerica struck a deal with US software vendor Mavenir to use its IP Multimedia System (IMS) Core technologies to update fixed and mobile networks in Mexico, Colombia and Chile.

Telefonica Hispanoamerica (Hispam) is a Telefonica division that offers services across Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Mexico, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Central America.

The deal built upon previous deployments of the same technology at O2 Telefonica in Germany and Virgin Mobile O2 in the UK. Virgin Mobile O2 is a joint venture between Telefonica and Liberty Global.

The IMS Core solution will be deployed on TCloud which is Telefonica’s private telco cloud infrastructure.

Mavenir said its cloud-native IMS core suite uses zero-touch network automation (ZTNA) and that it was purpose-built for fully automated cloud environments.

It also provides a fully containerised environment to enable improved agility and scaling as mobile operators migrate from 4G to 5G by using a microservice-based architecture.

Alejandro Ghianni, Planification and Engineering Director at Telefónica Hispam, stated core network functions needed to be modernised to support network evolution, and virtualised architectures need software that supports both VoLTE and 5G voice services.

Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.