 | Issue: | Europe II 2011 |
| Article no.: | 6 | |
| Topic: | Cloud computing comes to telecoms | |
| Author: | Lv A Bin | |
| Title: | Vice President, Cloud Computing | |
| Organisation: | ZTE | |
| PDF size: | 352KB |
About author
Lv A Bin is the Vice President for Cloud Computing at ZTE Corporation joined ZTE where he is in charge of the company’s cloud computing products. During his long career with ZTE, Lv A Bin has engaged and worked in technology development, marketing and planning, intelligent networks and value-added services with special emphasis upon telecom network architecture, mobile Internet, and cloud computing. Lv A Bin earned his Master’ degree from Harbin Institute of Technology.
Article abstract
Cloud computing gives companies and individuals access to a wide variety of service without the need to invest in the infrastructure needed for a variety of sophisticated computer services, they pay only for the infrastructure and applications they use, for the time they use them. Mobile and fixed telecom service providers offer the broadband connections needed to access cloud-based services, but network infrastructure costs are rising more rapidly than income and operators need ways to capture more of the revenues.
Full Article
Cloud computing technology arose when Internet businesses, early in their development, were trying to solve the critical issues of continuously increasing total cost of ownership, large-scale deployment of resources and large volumes of business data as well as fast-changing business models. Cloud computing technology is now gradually being introduced to the telecommunications industry as demand from operators for mobile Internet services has started to take off. By adopting Internet cloud computing concepts, the telecoms industry can organize and supply many telecoms network resources including storage, computing and software services. Cloud computing technology has become a new trend in telecoms development, and it has completely overturned the industry’s traditional methods of providing resources and user applications. The cloud is likely to bring fundamental reforms and in-depth industry integration between the telecom and IT sectors. For example, a telecoms operator can change the traditional vertically organised independent platform construction approach to construct a safe resource pool system that has computing, storage, network and operational management capabilities. Within the resource pool, the operator can deploy multiple service platforms on demand and enable resource sharing, on-demand resource allocation, green energy savings, high reliability, high scalability, and lower capital and operating expenses. Furthermore, service providers can develop new services in the IaaS (infrastructure as a service) resource pool, including cloud-based IDC services, virtual desktop services, and cloud-based network disk services. In this way, the telecoms operator provides Amazon-type EC2 or S3 services (S3 provides storage and Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2, offers resizable computing capacity in the cloud), dynamic rental of computing, storage, network and office desktop capability. The operator’s billing system, can let customers use services according to their needs, and pay for them according to the applications used. This way they can get higher quality services at a lower price. In addition, the operator can construct a PaaS (platform as a service) cloud platform on the IaaS resource pool to provide an open environment, including standard provision capabilities and interfaces. Meanwhile, Internet service capabilities can be mixed or integrated with telecom service capabilities, including IM (instant messaging) services and Internet of things service capabilities. The new services are then generated, providing an SMS cloud, MMS cloud, WAP cloud, and/or and AppStore cloud to optimise and enrich the openness and effectiveness of the PaaS layer in the IaaS resource pool. With the introduction of third party development cooperation, operators can explore a new business mode with support from cloud operations. In addition, through the cloud they can provide plentiful SaaS (software as a service), storage networking solutions (SNS) cloud and e-Trip services, and compete in the wider Internet market as well. Cloud computing brings new opportunities and challenges to operators. The ecosystem of cloud computing includes terminals, channel and cloud. At present, most operators offer customised terminals to their customers – sometimes as many as half of all their terminals – in addition to tablets and netbooks. This means that, PCs aside, operators can control the way over half of the terminals on their network operate. Because operators basically control all the access and core networks, they firmly control the network channels. ISPs, though, control the cloud services. Operators provide some fundamental services (including equipment rooms and bandwidth) that enable users to access the cloud services, but they would like to profit from a much wider range of services. Therefore, a common topic of discussion now is how an operator can avoid becoming just a bit pipe for other providers’ fee-earning services, especially since large scale 3G networks are now in service. When people use broadband connectivity to access Internet applications, relatively little revenue goes to the operators. Today, attention is focused on the traditional Internet ‘tycoon’ Google, and the new VIPs such as Facebook and Twitter. Mobile users keep increasing their revenue streams, so their market value keeps rising. Despite enormous investments in network development, operators’ gains have not increased correspondingly and they still have to deal with complaints from customers that their connections are too slow or that it is impossible to surf the Internet. With the rise of cloud computing though, the trend towards making the operator just a channel to enable fees to go to other service providers has intensified. Currently, the operator has to allocate bandwidth for access to cloud services, thus increasing the work of its network. The operator also has to continuously expand its capacity to ensure its customers have good experience with the service, but since its revenue is limited, at times declining, this is increasingly difficult. In China, for example, when a China Mobile customer uses his/her handset to access a cloud service provided through China Telecom’s fixed network, China Mobile must pay streaming fees to China Telecom, reducing the revenue it retains for its own services. Often, higher download charges cannot compensate the cost of streaming fee payments. How can a telecom operator avoid becoming just a channel – a bit-pipe? If it exerts its influence on the cloud service provider, it can not only provide infrastructure such as equipment rooms and broadband, but also provide virtual servers, as well as additional services to its customers. There is no reason why operators can’t act like Amazon, which provides S3, SimpleDB (a distributed database web service used with EC2) and other value-added services. In the PaaS layer, the operator can use its communications capabilities, introduce Internet capability and set up a unified development, test, host, and release platform so content providers can rapidly develop their services and offer them online. In the SaaS layer, the operator can provide Web-based conference organising services and IMS-based customer services to let customers rapidly use the services by themselves. To escape becoming a mere bit-pipe, telecom operators need, in addition to developing the cloud-layer services, to redefine their business models, take a lesson from the marketing methods developed in the Internet era, and take full advantage of its basic terminal and channel resources. In this way, telecom operators will be able to share in the benefits – and revenues – of the cloud-computing era.
