Login
Register
A TM Forum Catalyst project is helping China Unicom build an open NaaS ecosystem so it can work with more partners and contribute to more services in B2B and B2I.
China Unicom unlocks the potential of NaaS
Through a TM Forum Catalyst project, China Unicom is showing what’s possible with NaaS. The coalescence of technologies such as software control, virtualization, cloud, advanced analytics, microservices and open source software is opening up new opportunities for communications service providers (CSPs) and their partners to generate new revenues through network as a service (NaaS). NaaS provides those who don’t want to build and invest in their own network capability (or are unable to due to lack of a required telecoms licence, for instance) with a cloud-based connectivity infrastructure made up of components such as virtual machines, servers, switches, memory and storage. For telcos, NaaS opens new opportunities to build mobile virtual networks (MVNs) in new sectors and verticals to deliver specialized services. A recent report from TM Forum notes that the enterprise opportunity is particularly significant for CSPs. Markets and Markets predicts that the NaaS market is expected to grow from $4.3 billion in 2018 to $ 21.7 billion by 2023, at a compound annual growth rate of almost 40%.
A TM Forum Catalyst project is demonstrating how CSPs can unlock the full benefits of NaaS through the creation of an open business ecosystem, based on China Unicom’s Open Network System (ONS) architecture and TM Forum’s Open APIs. China Unicom is the Champion for the 4G & 5G NaaS for B2B & B2I Business Ecosystem. Catalyst Champions come up with a real business challenge that needs solving and work with participants – in this case, Huawei, Whale Cloud, Inspur and BOCO Inter-Telecom -- to rapidly find a solution. “The goal is to build an open NaaS ecosystem so we can work with more partners and contribute to more services and products in the B2B and B2I markets,” says Lei Wang, telecom senior engineer, China Unicom. “We also want to build a platform to enable more APIs so many more organizations can join the ecosystem and realise their products.”
China Unicom’s ONS architecture was used for the project while Inspur contributed its wireless network management and Whale Cloud the IT network management. Huawei brought service design, service and network orchestration, service assurance, artificial intelligence (AI) and big data and analytics services, and its technology was also used to catalog and manage the APIs. BOCO provided the operational systems support (OSS) and business support systems (BSS). Two uses cases were presented at TM Forum’s recent Digital Transformation World event in Nice to illustrate the concept.
The Catalyst worked with Tencent, the world’s largest mobile games company. Customers use a mobile app to connect to the games server via 4G and the company has 300 million registered users. The use case focused on one of its most popular multi-player games, Arena of Valor, which has 80 million active daily users. “It is very important for Tencent to ensure a high-quality user experience,” says Xiaokai Cheng, senior marketing manager, Huawei. The Catalyst demonstrated how the platform, developed through the Catalyst, can help respond to network acceleration requests. “If the user experience quality is bad in a certain area, an acceleration request can be actioned to temporarily improve the parity,” explained Cheng, noting that the service request is translated from Tencent’s servers via an API to the ONS platform. Using predefined rules, the ONS will automatically adjust the connection priority to improve the service experience for that user.
For the second use case the Catalyst team worked with an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) company, which was using drone technology to help deliver a lighting show in a city. The UAV space is valued at 20 billion Yen in China and straddles sectors such as agriculture, energy, government, media and entertainment, which all have different requirements. For the lighting show, more than 600 UAVs were densely distributed above the city’s square. These were connected to a UAV management and a virtual reality (VR) server in the cloud via 5G. The show involved a live virtual reality (VR) stream. To ensure it fulfilled the requirements, the Catalyst designed a service template and put in place a policy-driven guarantee mechanism. “We monitored all of the key performance indicators (KPIs) around our NaaS so in the case of a change in KPIs or a degrade, the ONS could automatically perform a policy restore to recover the network connected quality,” says Cheng.
In the future, the open NaaS platform will offer a full lifecycle 5G network slicing service model and orchestration capability. Ultimately, the network will be AI-based to provide self-healing, self-optimization and decision-making capabilities. The platform can be used by the business ecosystem to develop new products and services. As well as the platform and the community, the Catalyst team sees an app store as part of the ecosystem in the future. “We want to cooperate with more companies such as game developers or content providers so we can develop more APIs to make the project bigger and bigger,” says Wang.
