9:20 AM -- NICE -- Management World 2010 -- IP technology is the future of telecom, but it provides network operators with a major management challenge.

That was the key message from Liu Aili, executive VP at China Mobile Ltd. (NYSE: CHL), during his keynote presentation this morning here in Nice, talking about his company's migration to an IP network architecture. (See ZTE to Build China Mobile's IMS Core and 3G in China: Backhaul Bonanza.)

"Investing in IP is the right way, it is the future of telecoms. IP simplifies the network, but it makes network management more complicated," he stated.

The China Mobile man noted that to locate a recent problem with a streaming video service, the operations team had to check 14 different network elements, test 10 different protocols, and deploy engineers from five or six different engineering teams. "It was very time consuming," he concluded.

— Ray Le Maistre, International Managing Editor, Light Reading