China Telecom’s Open Source Commitment in 5G Era

5G technology has arrived in force in China, and this technological advancement offers numerous benefits and advantages for today’s companies. Among other things, 5G provides faster network speeds for streaming media, and allows for the Internet of Things (IoT) devices at the network edge. When combined with open source technologies, 5G is powerful, productive, and transformational.

China Telecom’s commitment to realizing the promise of open source technologies in the 5G era

As the world’s 10th largest telecommunications company, China Telecom Corporation (or CT) is committed to realizing the promise of open source technologies in the 5G era. It’s invested heavily in 5G networks and related R&D that include a number of open source contributions.  As a result in 2020, the company was able to offer its nearly 90M 5G subscribers access to 300,000 5G base stations in China — five times the number it featured at the end of 2019.  China Telecom also tallied 238M IoT devices on its network — a 50% increase over 2019.

China Telecom began highlighting its commitment to open source in its CTNet2025 white paper in 2016, discussing transformation and “cloudification” of the company’s networks using open source technologies as necessary to support the growing demand in bandwidth and compute resources at the network edge. By combining innovative, cloud-centric SDN and NFV open source technologies with the power of 5G, China Telecom views virtualization and automation as keys to more efficient allocation of network resources from core to edge as IoT, AR/VR, real-time critical compute applications and devices proliferate in China.

China Telecom’s open source contributions in the 5G Era

The following white paper updates readers on some of China Telecom’s open source contributions in the 5G Era and what’s happening with various initiatives:

• CT is committed to pursuing open-source innovations to increase value for its customers. These advancements will enable it to develop customized products and services flexibly and quickly, reduce software development threshold and risk, and improve reliability, security, performance and quality of digital experiences.
• CT actively participates and contributes to several open-source organizations and projects. These include 3GPP, 5GAA, IMT2020 5G promotion group, LF Networking (Linux Foundation), and ONAP.
• CT has also launched new open source projects in a wide range of industries, with critical pilot deployments in smart factories, manufacturing, transportation, healthcare, and education.

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