5G commercialization process accelerates operators to promote network intelligent transformation

The new round of technological changes continues to generate new services and applications, and puts higher requirements on communication networks. As the deployment of 5G networks continues to accelerate, telecom operators' existing network architecture faces challenges. Research institutions said that in order to meet the rapid development needs of various services involving extensive data and connections in the future, and ultimately meet the needs of client-centric wireless networking, SDN/NFV will constitute the key core of 5G technology.

Will 5G commercialization be brought forward?

2020 is the time point for 5G commercialization recognized both at home and abroad. With the government's promotion and the accelerated layout of all parties in the industry chain, this time point may be advanced?

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The "Information and Communication Industry Development Plan (2016-2020)" previously released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology clearly stated that 5G commercial services will be launched in 2020. According to the 5G promotion work deployment proposed by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and other departments and the 5G commercial plans of the three major operators, my country will launch the second phase of 5G network testing in 2017, conduct large-scale trial networking in 2018, and on this basis, start 5G network construction in 2019, and officially launch commercial services as early as 2020.

Recently, Wen Ku, director of the Information and Communications Development Department of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, revealed that my country's 5G research and development has entered the second phase of testing and will continue to keep pace with foreign countries. It is expected to be completed by the end of 2017.

According to reports, Zhu Hao from the Technical Standards Institute of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology said that MEC (Mobile Edge Computing) is the focus of the second phase of 5G trials. A comprehensive test will be conducted on how the MEC platform combines native features such as traffic diversion and billing with 5G cloud functions. The industry believes that large-scale deployment of MEC will accelerate the commercialization of 5G.

In February this year, at the 2017 Mobile World Congress (MWC 2017), Intel launched a comprehensive mobile edge computing product portfolio that can help communications service providers transform their networks and prepare for 5G.

Guo Jianhua, chief marketing expert of Huawei's packet core network MEC, believes that MEC will see the dawn of large-scale deployment in 2017. Meng Pu, chairman of Qualcomm China, also said, "The industry has always believed that 2020 is the time for 5G commercialization. Now everyone has seen the benefits that 5G brings to the industry, such as supporting autonomous driving and massive deployment of smart terminals. The industry has a great demand to advance the time."

In fact, the technical foundation of 5G networks is already in place. Foreign operators such as Verizon, T-Mobile and US Cellular have begun testing 5G modems. In February this year, Verizon, the largest mobile communications giant in the United States, announced that it will conduct 5G trial operations in 11 cities in the United States this year. This means that 5G services will officially begin to be opened to the consumer market.

5G drives operators to deploy next-generation networks

Although it will take some time for 5G to be commercialized, as the relevant deployment progresses, the challenges facing operators' existing network architecture are imminent.

The industry believes that the traditional networking methods of operators and relatively closed, proprietary technical solutions are increasingly unable to meet users' more flexible and diversified demands for wireless high-speed interconnection. Wei Leping, executive deputy director of the Science and Technology Committee of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and director of the Science and Technology Committee of China Telecom, has repeatedly pointed out that the current Internet has "arteriosclerosis", so the network architecture must be re-examined, re-structured, re-designed, and re-defined.

Wu Hequan, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said, "The two key technologies of 5G are network reconstruction and cloudification." Transforming network infrastructure and applications from traditional equipment based on proprietary architecture to SDN (software defined network) and NFV (network function virtualization) equipment based on open and general platforms is a prerequisite for the real implementation of 5G.

At present, the three major domestic operators have all transformed into virtualized and software-based communication networks. In July 2016, China Telecom released the "China Telecom CTNet2025 Network Architecture White Paper" and fully launched the intelligent reconstruction of the network. The goal is to achieve full network intelligence, intensiveness and openness by 2025. Achieve 80% network function virtualization, on-demand network capacity scale provision and build an integrated development and operation organization. In July 2015, China Mobile launched the next-generation innovative network - NovoNet, and released the NovoNet2020 vision at the same time. Duan Xiaodong, director of the Network Institute of China Mobile Research Institute, pointed out that "China Mobile's future network will be reconstructed at the architecture and network element levels. The architecture reconstruction focuses on the reconstruction of the underlying infrastructure with three-layer decoupling; the network element reconstruction focuses on designing network elements with a service-oriented architecture." In September 2015, China Unicom announced the new generation of network architecture CUBE-Net 2.0. Tang Xiongyan, chief expert of China Unicom Network Technology Research Institute, revealed that China Unicom currently has five major focuses, including: customer focus, field focus, basic focus, operation focus, and technology focus. "We hope that the NFV-based IoT core private network will become part of our 5G core network. This is the most important work in the NFV field this year."

It is reported that the intelligentization of operator networks has become a global trend. According to a report released by the international TBR Research, 18 of the world's top telecom operators plan to adopt SDN and NFV technologies within two years. It is expected that the SDN/NFV market will grow to US$158 billion by 2021, with a compound annual growth rate of more than 116%.