Huawei today announced its Cloud Open Labs with facilities located in China, the United States, and the European Union. The labs are interconnected via Huawei’s private clouds.

Some of these labs have been around for a while. Huawei’s Global Network Evolution and Experience Center (GNEEC) first launched in 2013 in Beijing. And the network functions virtualization (NFV) Open Lab first launched in 2014 with a presence in China, Germany, and the U.S. Its work focuses on NFV, software-defined networking (SDN), and data centers.

Huawei has connected its Cloud Open Labs and built a unified digital operations platform to support operators' network transformations. The labs will be used to verify virtualization and cloud technologies.

Asked if the labs were truly “open” and would welcome other competing telecom vendors, a Huawei spokesman said, “The labs are open to global operators and partners, including China Mobile, VMware, Red Hat, Canonical, Accenture, and Wind River. For example, in its first year, 12 carriers used the GNEEC to test their network evolution plans.”

The labs are also open to various industry organizations, including ETSI, OpenStack, OpenDaylight, OPNFV, and the Linux Foundation.

Representatives from several organizations attended the event announcing the labs. Those included the Linux Foundation, OPNFV, China Association of Communication Enterprises, Accenture, Red Hat, VMware, and Wind River.

The representative for OPNFV in China said the open source group will use the labs to help create consistent NFV interface protocols and standards.

At the event, Bruce Xun, Huawei’s VP of Global Technical Service, gave a demonstration of Voice over LTE  (VoLTE) services via a future-oriented, cloud-based network. He said, “Our Cloud Open Labs’ function is to establish an ecosystem, conduct pre-integration and pre-verification, and serve as a joint innovation platform, which will effectively enable the All Cloud Strategy."