At the UBBF 2021 data communication sub-forum, Lindel Sun, business development director of corporate market, from China Mobile Hong Kong, delivered a speech with the theme "Integrated Bearer, Slice enables Differentiated Services". Lindel Sun emphasized: “The slice-based bearer network is now supporting us to develop diversified services, accelerate network resource monetization, improve resource utilization, and deliver differentiated service experiences.”

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China Mobile Hong Kong is a subsidiary of China Mobile. It has provided mobile service in Hong Kong since 1997. The vision is to Become Customers' Preferred Digital Life Partner. The strategy is CHBN, which represent “To Consumer, To Home, To Business, and New Services”.

Director Sun shared the experience encountered in the construction of the bearer network. He said: “our previous network could not match our strategic goal. Because aggregation network was a rented network, different services were not able to be isolated. New service SLAs could not be assured, affecting our customer’s experience and prolonging Time to Market. Based on the above reasons, we defined our bearer target network with 5 objectives”.

Firstly, This network must be flexible and scalable to support all services, such as 5G, Home broadband, Private line, Cloud, and any newly emerged services.

Secondly, this network must be secure and highly reliable at both the device and network level.

The third one, this network must feature simplified and intelligent O&M, lowering the requirements on engineers’ personnel capabilities and help to reduce OPEX.

Furthermore, it must provide optimal TCO to enable long-term profit, through the construction of the unified integrated bearer, to save the TCO.

Last but not the least, our final objective is that the network must be capable of long-term evolution, to ensure the technical leadership in the market. For example, slicing function.

Then, Director Sun introduced the target network architecture is "one network for multi-services and intelligent bearer". For Control plane, planned three slices through an SDN controller: mobile slice, home broadband slice and enterprise slice. For Physical Plane, use FlexE technology to ensure E2E hard isolation among different slices. Even if congestion occurs in the mobile slice, the other slices remain unaffected, ensuring high-value services experience. And through SDN controller, all slices in physical plane can be orchestrated and managed intelligently and automatically. Furthermore, it allows on-demand expansion for slices, achieving optimal TCO.

Network slicing is the basis for providing differentiated services, it can maximize network resource utilization and liberate network potential. It can help carrier achieve the balance among investment, revenue, and customer experience.

In 2020, Network slicing was fully deployed across the whole network of China Mobile Hong Kong, and SDN controller is ready for commercial use. By summer of this year, CMHK has reached 5 million mobile subscribers, and the 5G network speed ranks No.1 in Hong Kong. In addition, CMHK has also awarded the Best 5G Network and Best 5G Enterprise Solution with the help of leading unified integrated bearer.

The slice-based bearer network is now supporting us to develop diversified services, accelerate network resource monetization, improve resource utilization, and deliver differentiated service experiences.

This content is sponsored by Huawei.