At SDN/NFV Industry Development Conference 2016 on September 21, director of China Telecom cloud computing research center Zhao Huiling said that China Telecom issued China Telecom CTNET2025 Network Architecture White Paper in July, comprehensively starting the network intelligent reconstruction.
China Telecom will adhere to the strategy of "network cloudization" and "collaborating old & new network / open capacity", divided into short-term and long-term stages: in 2016-2019, China Telecom will select some representative network elements and systems, combined with relevant system upgrading process and introduce NFV; in 2020-2025, it will carry all the network elements based on DC and build end-to-end network with DC as the core, achieving generalization of network element hardware resources.
According to Zhao Huiling, China Telecom has carried out vBRAS tests in 3 provinces this year. From the perspective of whole network cloudization, in addition to broadband and mobile network, fusion of first-level and second-level backbone networks, reconstruction of metro network, it has also made efforts in 5G.
Zhao Huiling pointed out that the main practical issue was interconnection and interoperability of different vendors. Performance, of course, is a key concern, especially in terms of vBRAS. China Telecom has also carried out experiments about scheduling of SDN in WAN. There are some technical problems, with mature and compatibility of the equipments as the main problem.