In advance of Mobile World Congress (MWC), Ericsson is slamming the airwaves with announcements this week. Here's what the network equipment giant has been saying related to virtualization and 5G.

Telefónica says Ericsson is its first manufacturing partner to use its new R&D lab  — 5TONIC — for the development of 5G products and services. The partners plan to develop a joint understanding of 5G use cases, deployment scenarios, and a 5G core based on a virtualized network architecture. They will sharpen their focus on the 5G PPP and ETP Networld 2020 programs, promoted by the European Commission.

Ericsson is also working at Vodafone Group’s UK Innovation Labs, along with a number of other partners, to research 5G technologies, define industry standards, establish technical guidelines, and prepare product roadmaps. Vodafone and its partners will conduct trials on Vodafone's radio and core networks in select global markets.

NTT and Ericsson are jointly working on the next generation of cloud servers. NTT wants to bring more flexibility to the carrier network, but it says disaggregation of server hardware into small modular components is one of the missing key technologies. As part of their collaboration, Ericsson and NTT will verify the capabilities and functionalities of Ericsson's Hyperscale Datacenter System 8000, which is based on Intel Rack Scale Architecture.

At the MWC show, Ericsson will give a live, cloud RAN demonstration, showing radio access functionality virtualized on remote COTS servers located in Sweden. It will also show its new Elastic RAN architecture as well as its vEPC (virtual evolved packet core) and vIMS (virtual IP multimedia subsystem).

Lastly, the vendor launched a cloud-based charging and billing product for digital service providers: Ericsson Revenue Manager 16. The business support system (BSS) is designed for operators to launch new products and services in minutes. It also allows real-time revenue sharing with partners. Estonian operator Telia Eesti is trialing Revenue Manager in a live environment.