Huawei is the latest vendor to secure a central role in Telefonica’s huge Unica virtualization project. The Chinese vendor will work with the operator to build a wide-ranging virtual EPC (evolved packet core), which will be deployed in 13 European and Latin American markets. The vEPC will be based on Huawei’s CloudEPC platform and will support LTE voice and data service delivery in Spain, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. This sees Telefonica following a common pattern among mobile operators – to adopt the EPC as the first candidate for virtualization. Unlike some other network elements, like the RAN, the packet core is often fairly discrete and can be migrated from…