In the China Future Network Development and Innovation Forum 2015 that recently held in Nanjing, vice President of China Telecom Beijing Research Institute Chen Yunqing made a speech, he stressed that China Telecom will take DC as its core and build the cloud applications on SDN/NFV-based networks to improve the operation efficiency and reduce the cost.
He pointed out that China Telecom will take business-driven as the priority in introducing SDN/NFV and take cloud and devices as entry points, it will take control as the first step and then forwarding in its networks. In terms of the devices, China Telecom will build vCPE and WiFi based on virtualization and general-purpose hardware infrastructure, achieving loading business with actual needs, self-help opening of services, fault locating and other functions; in the network, China Telecom will take actions in the edge penetration way and carry out SDN/NFV pilots and introduction in separate stages, including IPRAN, vEPC, vMSE, vIMS and others. Network is also the major bottleneck in cloud resources pool operation.
It is reported that China Telecom has launched vCPE pre-commercial services, it has carried out trials in existing networks of Beijing and Shanxi branches, the tests are aimed to provide broadband VPN services for trans-regional medium-sized enterprises and realize secure connection between multiple branches and headquarter, it will also provide WAN access, firewall, traffic data management and control services for small and medium-sized enterprises, as well as verify the effects of vCPE deployment on current network traffic, input-output ratio and others.
In addition, China Telecom has completed development of SDNO prototype system, after loading in the DC convergence network of Jiangsu branch, it has successfully achieved unified operation of controllers and routers from Huawei, Alcatel-Lucent Shanghai Bell, Cisco and other major vendors, it has been providing traffic intelligent dispatching services for all the IDCs in over 10 local networks of China Telecom Jiangsu branch. The system won the Best Solution Award in Huawei Developers Conference 2015.
At present, China Telecom has two backbone networks and a data center backbone network which is under construction, Chen Yunqing pointed out that China Telecom has powerful WiFi play capability and it can build “the fourth network” through WiFi cloudization, namely separate the WiFi AP management control from specific business customers and put it into the cloud data centers.
China Telecom has adopted NFV technologies in building the WiFi "fourth network", it can realize exclusive and secure WiFi access through switches and achieve WiFi flexible extension, low cost and rapid business deployment based on construction of virtual resources pool. In addition, it can achieve multi users and secure separation through intensive management of vAC/vBRAS/vDPI, as well as WiFi network backward operation by open of capacities.
At the end of his speech, he said that SDN/NFV is no longer in the concept stage, but has entered into the practical stage. Technologies need to be driven by the applications, and cloud and devices are good starting points, the operators could achieve Internet+ capacities through coordination in the cloud and networks. "The operators’ network scale is too large and difficult to carry out revolutionary transformation, therefore, it must be evolved in the penetration way and only when a model is formed can they continue to expand."