Today, the Intelligent Cloud-Network Session themed "Build Intelligent Cloud-Network, Accelerating New Growth" was successfully held in Dubai. As an important part of the 7th Ultra-Broadband Forum (UBBF 2021), this session saw leading operators and analysts of well-known institutions gather from all over the world to discuss topics relating to advanced network architecture and share successful business practices in the cloud-network era.
In the wake of pandemic, governments of many countries have accelerated their digitalization process. This is triggering great changes in the IP industry. Operators’ network construction has changed from connection-centric to cloud-centric. During the evolution from traditional IP networks to intelligent cloud-networks, what are the real requirements of enterprise and industry customers? Which innovative technologies can meet these requirements? What impact does the evolution of the network architecture have on operators’ infrastructure and operation mode? These were the focal points discussed at this session.
Dan Bieler, analyst from Forrester, kicked things off by proposing that emerging technologies drive user requirements to change. In his view, enterprise digitalization introduces requirements for service cloudification, requiring operators to build intelligent networks that feature cloud-network convergence to transform from ICT to DICT.
Hank Chen, President of Huawei’s Router Domain, then gave a speech themed "Building Intelligent Cloud-network, Enabling All-Service Growth". In his speech, he mentioned that consumer and vertical industry services are becoming more diversified, and that user experience upgrade and vertical industry upgrade present great opportunities to operators. Operators need to build an all-in-one IP network that supports network programming, tenant-level SLA assurance, and agile cloudification to meet the growth requirements of all individual, home, and enterprise services, and ultimately lay a foundation for operators’ DICT transformation.
Fiber@Home is the largest Internet service provider in Bangladesh, and focuses on how to deliver secure, robust, and faster fiber networks across the country. Sumon Ahmed Sabir, CTO of Fiber@Home, explained how their business success comes from quickly seizing business opportunities. As such, their target network architecture must be agile and flexible to respond to new business demands. In addition, Fiber@Home actively introduces innovative technologies such as SRv6 path programming, FlexE hard slicing, and service visualization to develop new business models and thus succeed in the market.
In Hong Kong, CMHK is undergoing a transformation from providing only mobile services to providing diversified services such as home broadband and enterprise private lines. Lindel Sun, Director of the Business Development Department, believed that network slicing technology enables differentiated service bearing on the live network and meets varying requirements of different services, laying a solid foundation for the strategic transformation of CMHK.
Francois Olivier, chief engineering of Rain, the first 5G service provider in South Africa, said that massive connections, rapid bandwidth growth, and high SLA reliability are the main characteristics of 5G service development. The primary goal of Rain network development is to build a converged bearer network that features ultra-large capacity, SRv6-based simplified architecture, slicing, and automated O&M. In this way, the digitalization process of numerous industries can be accelerated.
UBBF is the world’s highest-level fixed network summit, jointly organized by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and Huawei. This Intelligent Cloud-Network Session, aiming to help global operators explore new markets, exhibits operators’ cloud-oriented network architectures and Huawei’s differentiated capabilities of Intelligent Cloud-Network Solution.
