On November 14 and 15, 2023, the 8th 5G Core Summit was hosted by Informa Tech in Istanbul, Türkiye. During the summit, Deniz Celik, the Enhanced Voice Services Associate Director at Turkcell, and Pinar Yavuzaslan Kilic, the Broadband Network Associate Director at Turkcell, together delivered a keynote speech entitled "Building the Future: Turkcell Network Construction". According to them, building a super reliable core network is a key factor to Turkcell's business success.
Deniz Celik, the Enhanced Voice Services Associate Director at Turkcell
Pinar Yavuzaslan Kilic, the Broadband Network Associate Director at Turkcell
Turkcell is a leading digital operator, founded and headquartered in Türkiye, with operations spanning four countries — Türkiye, Ukraine, Etc. — boasting 50 million users and being the only Turkish company listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).
During her speech, P nar Yavuzaslan K l shared the cloudification strategy and practice history of Turkcell's core network infrastructure. Within the last six years, Turkcell has successfully cloudified most of core networks, rolling out more than 30 types of core network services. To date, the Control and User Plan Separation (CUPS) architecture in the core network's packet service domain has been fully realized, allowing control network functions to be pooled and the user plane to be deployed at the edge, which delivers an improved user experience. Furthermore, the core network's voice domain is capable of providing VOLTE, VoWifi, One Number and eSIM services in Türkiye.
Deniz Celik stressed that the core network is the key to ensuring network reliability. Turkcell provides core networks with eight-level disaster recovery design, ranging from data center disaster recovery to server failover. It is able to withstand a 64-fold signaling surge, ensuring quick service recovery in extreme situations. To secure mobile user data and voice, Turkcell has deployed ultra-large UDMs in the three largest cities in Türkiye. Each site supports dual backup. When a fault occurs, troubleshooting can be completed without site switchover. In addition, Turkcell provides inter-network roaming of voice services, whereby it can take over voice services from another operator's network when this network is faulty, guaranteeing service continuity.
Deniz elik also shared two typical scenario cases later on. In 2022, when a severe earthquake hit Türkiye, voice services quintupled. In the above situation, Turkcell successfully defended against an 11-fold signaling surge and quickly restored services, providing a valuable communication lifeline nationwide for 14 million users.
On Türkiye's 100th anniversary of its National Day, Turkcell provisioned each user with a 10-GB service package. Though the traffic of the entire network increased by 50% that day, the core network stably with zero service interruption.
Turkcell will continue to implement the strategy of building ultra-reliable networks, so as to lay a solid foundation for achieving business success and delivering a superior user experience, and to move forward from the 5G era to an even more thriving 5.5G era.