Vodafone Egypt has entered into a multi-million dollar, multi-year partnership with network intelligence services provider Procera Networks to enhance the subscriber experience for its fixed and mobile subscribers.

The companies would not divulge the precise value of the deal or how long it will be in place for, but did confirm it would help Vodafone Egypt keep up with the move to Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) and help identify traffic from new internet applications and services, despite the growth of encryption.

Encryption, the companies explain, is essential for pinpointing the cause of subscriber performance issues on the network.

The deal will also help the operator meet new regulatory requirements, driven by telecom regulators, to monitor the subscriber experience by all operators in the Middle East.

Vodafone Egypt is said to have a subscriber base of over 39 million, and the alliance has been brokered to apply virtualised solutions and deliver subscriber experience analytics to Vodafone Egypt's network.

Procera Networks will deploy analytics solutions that identifies traffic signatures and makes it possible to deliver fine-grained application identification.

According to the network virutalisation solution firm, their technology provides a unique view of quality, with high-frequency measurements of quality in categories that subscribers can relate to – including web surfing, streaming video, social media, real-time gaming and voice applications.

"Procera's virtual solutions delivered on the promise of Network Functions Virtualisation for Vodafone Egypt today, enabling us to accelerate our NFV deployment timelines," said Osama Siad, Vodafone Egypt's Technology Director.

Siad added: "Procera's PacketLogic solutions, especially ScoreCard, enable us to dynamically deploy analytics capacity to ensure our customers are receiving a high-quality broadband experience across our entire network footprint."

Lyn Cantor, President and CEO at Procera Networks, said: "We believe that our strategic focus on virtualization use cases for fixed and mobile network will enable both operators and subscribers to benefit from their broadband networks."

"Virtualisation of analytics is a key initiative for the Middle East region," said Hashem Eid, Procera's Managing Director of Sales for Middle East. "With regional operators competing on network quality, reducing the cost and increasing the deployment flexibility of analytics through virutualisation is a business imperative."

According to Procera Networks, virtualisation in the telco space has been more difficult than the operators (and some vendors) would have liked because of technical challenges with MANO standards, but also a challenge from an organisation point of view.

"Many operators many operators have a hard line between IT and Network Engineering, and successful implementations of NFV and virtualisation require that line to go away. Virtualisation will deliver cost savings long term, as well as increase the agility of networks to offer both new services as well as to enhance the existing network quality," the service provider explains.