Category Archives: China Mobile

China Mobile, data centre, NEC, News & Analysis, Public Cloud, Submarine Cable

Google’s trans-Pacific submarine cable enters into service today

GoogleA consortium of tech giants including Google and NEC has completed the construction and end-to-end testing of a new trans-Pacific submarine cable system, reports Telecoms.com.

The 9,000km FASTER Cable System enters into service today (30 June), and is claimed to be the first cable system designed from the outset to support digital coherent transmission technology, using optimized fibers throughout the submarine portion. The cable system lands in Oregon in the United States and two landing points in Japan, Chiba and Mie. The team claim the cable will be able to deliver 60 Terabits per second (Tbps) of bandwidth across the Pacific.

“From the very beginning of the project, we repeatedly said to each other, ‘faster, Faster and FASTER,’ and at one point it became the project name, and today it becomes a reality,” said Hiromitsu Todokoro, Chairman of the FASTER Management Committee. “This is the outcome of six members’ collaborative contribution and expertise together with NEC’s support.”

The consortium includes China Mobile International, China Telecom Global, Global Transit, Google, KDDI and Singtel, of which Google has been one of the most vocal. On the official blog, Google said the new cable will help the team launch a new Google Cloud Platform East Asia region in Tokyo.

The new data centre in Tokyo is part of Google’s ambitions to dominate cloud computing and other enterprise service offerings. While it is generally considered to be ranked third in the public cloud stakes, with AWS and Microsoft Azure out ahead, it has been making strides in recent months. Alongside the Tokyo data centre launch, another was opened in Oregon, and there are plans for a further ten over the course of 2017.

Google has been investing in submarine cables since 2008, initially with the 7.68Tb trans-Pacific Unity cable, which came online in 2010. The completion of the project now takes the number of Google-owned undersea cables up to four, though there are likely to be more added in the coming years.

“Today, Google’s latest investment in long-haul undersea fibre optic cabling comes online: the FASTER Cable System gives Google access to up to 10Tbps (Terabits per second) of the cable’s total 60Tbps bandwidth between the US and Japan,” said Alan Chin-Lun Cheung, a Google Submarine Networking Infrastructure.

“We’ll use this capacity to support our users, including Google Apps and Cloud Platform customers. This is the highest-capacity undersea cable ever built — about ten million times faster than your average cable modem — and we’re beaming light through it starting today.”

Alcatel-Lucent, China Mobile, Datacentre, News & Analysis, SDN, Software Defined Networking, Sunil Khandekar, Telco Cloud

China Mobile revamps private cloud with Nuage SDN

China Mobile, Alcatel Lucent and their respective subsidiaries are working together on SDN in many contexts

China Mobile, Alcatel Lucent and their respective subsidiaries are working together on SDN in many contexts

China Mobile’s IT subsidiary Suzhou Software Technology Company has baked Nuage Networks’ software-defined networking technology into its private cloud architecture to enable federation across multiple China Mobile subsidiaries. The move comes the same week both parent companies – China Mobile and Alcatel Lucent – demoed a virtualised radio access network (RAN), a core network component.

The company deployed Nuage’s Virtualised Services Platform (VSP) and Virtual Services Assurance Platform (VSAP) for its internal private cloud platform in a bid to improve the scalability and flexibility of its infrastructure, and enable infrastructure federation between the company’s various subsidiaries.

Each subsidiary is allocated its own virtual private cloud with its own segmented chunk of the network, but enabling infrastructure federation between them means underutilised assets can be deployed in other parts of the company as needed.

“China Mobile is taking a visionary approach in designing and building its new DevOps private cloud architecture,” said Nuage networks chief executive officer Sunil Khandekar.

“By combining open source software with Nuage Networks VSP, China Mobile is replacing and surpassing its previous legacy architecture in terms of power, sophistication and choice. It will change the way China Mobile operates internally and, ultimately, the cloud services they can provide to customers,” Khandekar said.

The move comes the same week China Mobile and Alcatel Lucent trialled what the companies claimed to be the industry’s first virtualised RAN, which for an operator with over 800 million subscribers has the potential to deliver significant new efficiencies across its datacentres if deployed at scale.

AT&T, China Mobile, China Telecom, Comcast, Deutsche Telekom, Lithium, Networks, News & Analysis, OpenDaylight, OpenFlow, Orange, Sarwar Raza, SDN, T-Mobile, Telefónica I+D, Virtualisation

OpenDaylight launches third open source SDN platform, announces advisory group

OpenDaylight has released the latest version of its open source SDN platform and cobbled together an advisory group to improve the feedback loop between deployment and feature evolution

OpenDaylight has released the latest version of its open source SDN platform and cobbled together an advisory group to improve the feedback loop between deployment and feature evolution

The OpenDaylight project has released the third version of its open source software-defined networking (SDN) platform, Lithium, as the organisation launches an advisory tasked with feeding technical insights learned through deployment back into the developer community.

The OpenDaylight Project is an open source collaboration between many of the industry’s major networking incumbents on the core architectures enabling software defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualisation (NFV).

The community is developing an open source SDN architecture and software, the latest release of which has been dubbed Lithium, that supports a wide range of protocols including OpenFlow, the southbound protocol around which most vendors have consolidated.

“End users have already deployed OpenDaylight for a wide variety of use cases from NFV, network on demand, flow programming using OpenFlow and even Internet of Things,” said Neela Jacques, executive director, OpenDaylight.

“Lithium was built to meet the requirements of the wide range of end users embedding OpenDaylight into the heart of their products, services and infrastructures. I expect new and improved capabilities such as service chaining and network virtualization to be quickly picked up by our user base,” Jacques said.

The organisation said Lithium boats a number of improvements over the previous release of its platform, Helium, like increased scalability, native support for OpenStack Neutron, new security, monitoring and automation features, support for more APIs and protocols including Source Group Tag eXchange (SXP), Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP), IoT Data Management (IoTDM), SMNP Plugin, Open Policy Framework (OpFlex) and Control and Provisioning of Wireless Access Points (CAPWAP).

“We see OpenDaylight as a powerful platform for carrier-grade SDN solutions, which is getting more feature-rich with every release,” said Sarwar Raza, vice president, NFV Product Management, HP and OpenDaylight Project board member. “ConteXtream, now an HP Company, has been active in the OpenDaylight community since its inception and has made significant contributions to Service Function Chaining, an important capability for NFV. We look forward to our continued involvement in the OpenDaylight project to help enable widespread adoption of SDN and create a solid foundation for NFV.”

The move comes the same week the project announced the formation of the OpenDaylight Advisory Group (AG), a group composed mostly of telcos tasked with providing technical input to the OpenDaylight developer community based on deployment experience.

The twelve founding members of the advisory group include researchers and specialists from China Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, T-Mobile, China Mobile, Telefónica I+D, AT&T, Orange, and Comcast.

The organisation said the advisory group was set up to help provide technical and strategic guidance to the steering committee and developer community – in other words, to keep the open source platform from straying from the requirements of those deploying it.

Interestingly, apart from NASDAQ, enterprises seem relatively under-represented on the committee, which could see future iterations of OpenDaylight focus more heavily on those use cases – possibly over others more common in the enterprise.