China Telecom Research Articles

Understanding mechanisms of digital transformation in state-owned enterprises in China: An institutional perspective

In recent years, organizations across myriad industries have begun adopting novel digital technologies and, in doing so, fostered their digital transformation. This study examines the digital transformation in state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China. We conducted comparative case studies on China Mobile and China Unicom, two typical and leading SOEs in China's telecommunications industry, to identify the company's transformation characteristics and how key factors impact the transformation process. This research also contributes to digital transformation literature and to the institutional theory. We develop a conceptual framework for analyzing enterprise digital transformation, and generate some theoretical prescriptions. The research findings conclude that, based on innovation in digital technology by generations, enterprise digital transformation on strategic positioning, value proposition (services and products), and value creation (assets and organizational structure) presents a process by stages; both institutional pressures and technological attraction impact how SOEs carry out digital transformation; different SOEs with different characteristics in value creation present different transformation process. Future research could use the framework as an analytical tool and draw upon the theoretical prescriptions to examine digital transformation in different kinds of organizations. At last, this research also offers practical insights for SOEs to carry out digital transformations and for governments to offer supportive institutional environment for this process.

Comparative Analysis of Time Series Prediction Algorithms on Multiple Network Function Data of NWDAF

With the emergence and vigorous development of 5G technology, there is a significant surge in network usage and traffic, resulting in heightened complexity within network and IT environments. This exponential increase in activity produces a plethora of events, making conventional systems inadequate for the efficient management of 5G networks. In comparison to 4G technology, 5G technology brings forth a host of new features, one of which is the network data analytics function (NWDAF). This function grants network operators the flexibility to either employ their own data analytics methodologies based on machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) into their networks. In this paper, we present a dataset named “NWDAF-NFPP” for network function performance time series prediction, collected from a laboratory at China Telecom. The dataset is carefully anonymized to ensure maximum realism and comprehensiveness, while safeguarding sensitive information. It encompasses eight categories of network functions, with data collected at five-minute intervals. The availability of this dataset provides valuable resources for researchers to conduct time series prediction research on network element performance. Following data collection, a total of six models were employed for network element performance prediction, encompassing both machine learning and deep learning approaches. This diverse set of models was carefully chosen to ensure comprehensive coverage of different techniques and algorithms. Through the comparison and analysis of these models, we aim to evaluate their predictive capabilities and identify the most effective approach for network element performance prediction. This comparative analysis will provide valuable insights into the strengths and limitations of each model, aiding in informed decision-making for network optimization and management strategies in the future.

P-RAN, a Fog Computing Platform for 5G and 6G Services

With the success of cloud computing, expectations on edge and fog computing have been high. Unfortunately, progress has been below expectations with only limited success in vertical industries due to cost and privacy concerns. New use cases and architectures are needed. As a promising technology, device-to-device (D2D) communication has been in development for years. However, the use of D2D among smartphones is still limited despite the efforts. In this paper, the integration of D2D technology, cellular network, and blockchain is explored to gain a synergy for commercial fog computing that addresses the cost and privacy concerns. Based on the idea of Proximity Radio Access Network (PRAN), China Telecom has launched D2D-based services with a commercial platform to offer a wide range of proximity services. Besides, the blockchain-enabled P-RAN service platform is also being promoted and applied. With the availability of this commercial platform, this paper discusses the possibility of offering fog-computing based services for a possible large-scale commercial realization. Both technical and business aspects are explored to make the case for this proposal. Finally, two use cases are proposed and the numerical analysis is carried out.

Innovative Marketing Strategies in China's Telecommunication Sector: Adapting to the Digital Age

This research study examined the innovative marketing strategies employed by telecommunication firms in China's rapidly evolving digital age. The study focused on the past practices and adaptations made by companies to navigate the dynamic landscape of the telecommunication sector in China. A literature-based approach was adopted, incorporating scholarly articles, industry reports, and case studies to establish a comprehensive understanding of the marketing strategies implemented by telecommunication firms in China. The analysis encompassed historical data and industry trends to identify key strategies that were employed in the past. The research shed light on the innovative marketing strategies adopted by telecommunication firms in response to the emerging digital age. It explored the use of digital platforms, social media, and mobile applications as effective tools for customer engagement and brand promotion. Furthermore, the study delved into the past experiences of telecommunication firms in China, assessing their ability to adapt to the changing consumer preferences and technological advancements. The analysis revealed the significance of customer-centric approaches, personalized marketing campaigns, and data-driven strategies in the success of telecommunication firms. The findings of this research contribute to a deeper understanding of the marketing strategies implemented by telecommunication firms in China's digital age. The insights gained from the analysis can inform the future marketing strategies and approaches of telecommunication companies, helping them adapt to the ever-changing market dynamics. The research underscores the importance of agility and innovation in the face of the digital age, emphasizing the need for continuous evolution and adaptation in marketing strategies. By learning from past experiences and embracing innovative approaches, telecommunication firms in China can establish a competitive edge and effectively cater to the evolving needs of their customers. In conclusion, the study emphasized the importance of adapting to changing market dynamics and employing customer-centric, data-driven approaches to achieve success in the telecommunication sector. Keywords: Innovative marketing strategies, China's telecommunication sector, Adapting, Digital age, Digital platforms

Who drives the international standardisation of telecommunication and digitalisation? Introducing a new data set

AbstractReinforced by the technological decoupling and the related battle for technological supremacy between the United States and China, telecommunication technology has become increasingly politicised. As the functioning of global telecommunication technology relies on interoperability and compatibility, government and private actors have strong incentives to shape the underlying standards in their economic and political interests. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and its Members play a central role in setting these standards for future telecommunication technology. Despite the ITU's importance in this field, relatively little is known about the organisation's work on standardisation and the actors behind it. This Policy Insight introduces a new data set on the involvement of over 800 government and private actors and their almost 50,000 contributions to ITU standardisation processes between 2000 and 2022. A descriptive analysis of the data set illustrates that particularly Chinese actors—Huawei, ZTE, China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom—have been actively driving the ITU's standardisation processes in the areas of transport, access and home but also future networks and cloud. The data set introduced here is envisaged as a source which allows researchers to study the reasons and implications for certain actors' involvement in the international standardisation of telecommunication and digitalisation.

The digital rise and its economic implications for China through the Digital Silk Road under the Belt and Road Initiative

This research, based on a review of secondary information, explores how the government of China and the country's leading technological enterprises are working together to develop infrastructure for next-generation digital technologies, e.g. artificial intelligence, cloud computing, quantum computing, 5G networks, navigation satellites, and fiber optic cables; to establish technical norms and standards; and to provide services and digital content, e.g. digital messaging applications, mobile payment systems, and e-commerce platforms, to emergent markets; as well as how digital corporate giants of China like Alibaba, Huawei, Baidu, ZTE, China Telecom, China Mobile, China Unicom, and Tencent have been challenging the prevailing status quo. Beijing seeks to assert its dominant role in world affairs through the Digital Silk Road (DSR) to globally influence and control a sizable part of the digital economy. The DSR has significant potential for enhancement of digital interdependence with the underdeveloped and some advanced economies by bridging the gap created by the absence of a critical infrastructure of global digital technology. There is no viable competitor to the DSR's exciting and long-term vision of a globally connected digital future for facilitating mutual growth and collaboration that will ultimately push for a dependency of other countries on DSR under the Belt and Road Initiative.

Bundling and nonlinear pricing in telecommunications

AbstractI develop a multiproduct nonlinear pricing model where a firm sells both discrete and continuous services to consumers with multidimensional heterogeneity. I derive the optimal selling mechanism and provide primitive conditions under which different bundling strategies arise. Exploiting both the firm and the consumer's optimality conditions, I show that the model structure is nonparametrically identified and propose a semiparametric estimation procedure. An application to China Telecom data shows that mixed bundling of internet and landline phone services is more beneficial to both the firm and the consumer relative to component pricing.

Field Trial of Network Slicing in 5G and PON-Enabled Industrial Networks

Driven by recent technology advances in fifth generation (5G) wireless networks and optical communications, fundamental changes are taking place in traditional industrial networks to evolve with enhanced automation, improved monitoring, and smart interconnectivity. These changes call for updating the current network to provide service agility, intelligence, and scalability. Network slicing creates independent and logical networks on the same physical network to meet the requirements of various services. It enables an industrial network to offer tailored services as the business evolves to stay competitive. In this article, we propose a novel abstraction model of end-to-end network slicing for future industrial networks. The model enables multi-service applications over a converged industrial network with access from both 5G and passive optical network (PON) users. Performance of this model is investigated via a field trial in China Telecom's deployed 5G and PON networks for a manufacturing company. Field trial results demonstrate that the 5G and PON technologies can jointly meet the service requirements of industrial network services. The proposed network slicing model improves service quality.

5G Charging Mechanism Based on Dynamic Step Size

In this work, a newly dynamic step size-based 5G charging mechanism was proposed with the introduction of random forest algorithm, user daily traffic forecast model, and RG distribution model for the pressure release on charging system caused by the growing consumption demands based on the behavior feature selection of subscribers. After the verification of the dynamic step size mechanism, optimization analysis was performed from three aspects, including authorization step statistical results, Charging Data Record, and timely reminders by utilizing the real monthly traffic usage data of 13,000 users from China Telecom. Result shows that the amount of charging messages between the network elements and the charging systems decreases by about 35%, and the timeliness rate of reminder service increases by approximately 30%. This research realizes an innovative updating of traditional charging systems to effectively improve the efficiency of the 5G charging system and achieves a reduction in system maintenance and resource occupation. Along with the improvement of service quality and user experience, this work provides an innovation method for operators and different associated businesses to tackle new challenges in 5G.

China Telecom’s Research and Applications of Business-Enterprise Full-Optical Networking

With the continuous development of optical fiber access and other network infrastructure, cloud conference, online education, online office, cloud VR and other innovative services requiring high bandwidth are widely developed, which puts forward higher requirements on network bandwidth, delay, jitter and stability. Upgrading the legacy optical fiber network, building a gigabit optical broadband network, and promoting the further extension of optical fiber network to the enterprises help to improve the operation efficiency of information infrastructure and solve the problem of network coverage. High-quality business and enterprise broadband services can be realized, which stimulate potential consumer demand, and lay a solid foundation for the sustainable development of internet services. The business-enterprise full-optical network technology and the applications are studied, the related industrial chain and standardization progress are introduced, and the application mode and development trend are analyzed in this paper.

Survey of computing power network

In September 2021, ITU-T released the first international recommendation for computing power networks (CPNs), ITU-T Y.2501 jointly led by China Telecom, China Unicom and Huawei, and started the Y.2500-Y.2599 series of recommendations for computing power networks. The computing power network is a new type of network that integrates multilevel computing resources, realizes the efficient coordination of the cloud, edge and network, improves the utilization efficiency of computing resources and provides users with the optimal computing and network resource services. Since the first proposal of the computing power network in 2019, it has made breakthroughs in its research and standardization work. As a new field of international standards, also a new field of the communication industry, this paper gives a comprehensive analysis of its definition, framework, service model, key technologies and current progress and challenges, summarizing the research direction of future computing power networks which will have strong implications for the research and implementation of the computing power network.

Anomaly Detection and Early Warning Model for Latency in Private 5G Networks

Different from previous generations of communication technology, 5G has tailored several modes especially for industrial applications, such as Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communications (URLLC) and Massive Machine Type Communications (mMTC). The industrial private 5G networks require high performance of latency, bandwidth, and reliability, while the deployment environment is usually complicated, causing network problems difficult to identify. This poses a challenge to the operation and maintenance (O&M) of private 5G networks. It is needed to quickly diagnose or predict faults based on high-dimensional data of networks and services to reduce the impact of network faults on services. This paper proposes a ConvAE-Latency model for anomaly detection, which enhances the correlation between target indicators and hidden features by multi-target learning. Meanwhile, transfer learning is applied for anomaly prediction in the proposed LstmAE-TL model to solve the problem of unbalanced samples. Based on the China Telecom data platform, the proposed models are deployed and tested in an Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) application scenario. The results have been improved compared to existing research.

Chastnye radiotelegrafnye stancii i telekommunikacionnyj suverenitet Kitaya s konca dinastii Cin do perioda Bejyan

At the end of the 19th century, the telegraph became the most widespread means of communication, especially in the military field, and therefore the Chinese government began to build radiotelegraph stations everywhere. However, due to the special political situation at that time, the Chinese government was faced with the problem of building radio telegraph stations by foreigners in private, which violated China's telecommunications sovereignty. How the Qing and Bain governments dealt with and solved this problem is the subject of this study.

Impact of Reducing Data Plan Costs on the Digital Divide in China: A Digital Lifestyles Perspective

The digital divide first emerged as an important social and human rights issue in the 1990s. With the rapid development of wireless network technology (e.g., Wi-Fi and cellular networks) and mobile terminal devices (e.g., mobile phones, laptops, and tablets), this issue has shifted to concern mobile Internet access. The three main Chinese telecom operators (China Mobile Communications Corporation, China Unicom Communications Corporation, and China Telecom Communications Corporation) have recently promoted unlimited data plans (UDPs) to reduce information usage costs and increase mobile data use. However, assessments of the impact of these policy changes on the mobile digital divide are limited. This study therefore offers insights into how a reduction in information costs can eliminate this divide. Using a difference-in-differences (DID) approach based on a monthly panel of system-generated mobile app data for subscribers, we find that the UDPs have various effects on promoting the use of mobile Internet and on the digital divide, depending on whether subscribers are of high or low socioeconomic status (i.e., urban versus rural and rich versus poor). We show that the relative differences are alleviated, but the absolute difference further increases after the implementation of a UDP subscription. In addition, a UDP subscription has heterogeneous effects on lifestyles. For the poor or those in rural areas, only promoting UDP does not effectively narrow the mobile digital divide because of insufficient cognition about and persistent weaknesses in the use of information technology.

Market share forecast analysis of three major operators based on Markov chain

Reasonable forecast products market share is the enterprise marketing decisions, one of the important factors which should be considered on the basis of three carriers in China mobile users, with the help of the theory of markov prediction model of market share, the change trend in maintaining market stability, the change of the future market share, the results show that the The results show that the market share of mobile users of China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom will be stable at 60.0%,24.2% and 15.8% in future.

Design and implementation of IoT gas meter based on security chip

IoT gas meter is facing the challenge of information security. This paper designs and implements a scheme of gas meter based on security chip. The scheme uses stm32l073 as MCU to collect gas metering data, cooperates with Hua Hong’s security chip, and uses NB_IoT as the communication module. The business data is pushed to the gas meter business management system through China Telecom Tianyi IoT platform CTWing, so as to realize the remote safety management of gas meters.

An Energy-Efficient Framework in Radio Multi-Access Edge Cloud by Automatically Generating Network Slice

Traditional radio multi-access edge computing (RMEC) mainly serves information transmission. However, networking devices tend to be powered by batteries, and the life time of the network is constrained by battery capacity. How to power networking devices in RMEC is a key challenge. Wireless energy transfer (WET), a technology that uses radio frequency signals to charge devices wirelessly, offers the potential to eliminate this performance bottleneck. In this article, a framework for automatically generating network slice (AGNS) is proposed, where “WET” is set as a special application to realize synchronous transmission of energy and information by network slices. First, we discuss the development trends of RMEC. Next, we embark on customized services and resource efficiency maximization to reduce device's energy consumption, and analyze technical challenges. AGNS provides a logical mapping method to bridge the qualitative demand of new applications and the quantitative supply of slices, and provides a slice orchestration strategy to automatically combine virtualized network functions and optimize virtualized network resources for virtual private network (VPN). AGNS also provides a physical mapping approach to establish the resource corresponding relation between the network slices and physical devices in dynamic environments. Simulation results show that AGNS is superior to existing methods which adopt the “best effort” mode with a “one size fits all” rule, in terms of acceptance rate, resource efficiency and energy consumption. The AGNS framework is measured by the data of 10T of China Telecom Sichuan Branch. The results are consistent with our theoretical analysis.

Investigation and Research on the Use of the App of the National Anti Fraud Center

China's telecommunications fraud crime continues to occur at a high rate, coupled with the changing means of fraud, and an increasing number of people are being defrauded. In the face of such oppression, the Ministry of Public Security launched the national anti fraud center App in June 2021, which aims to help users maintain the security of telecommunications networks, establish channels for users to report cases related to telecommunications networks, and enhance the purpose of prevention and publicity. However, with the strong support of the state for anti fraud Apps and the requirement of all people to download them, a series of problems came one after another. Different voices were transmitted on major platforms, which also proved that there were some defects in Apps. The project studies the problems existing in the anti fraud App since its launch, such as the imprecise mode setting, the lack of in-depth publicity and education, and the low download rate, and puts forward corresponding solutions to these problems, so as to help the App serve people better.

Early Warning of Telecom Customer Churn Based on Multialgorithm Model Optimization

Background: China telecom is the largest integrated information service provider in China, its business volume all over the world. It is interesting to note that China Unicom and other telecom companies have carried out similar businesses one after another. How to prevent the loss of existing customers in the fierce competition is an important issue for telecom companies to think about.Methods: This work aims to build a variety of algorithm models for target optimization and use them to predict whether telecom companies will lose customers, respond to the early warning of customer churn, and then implement active retention measures. Data characteristics affect the final loss prediction effect. In this study, the weight contribution rate of each characteristic variable is obtained by calculating the evidence weight and then the characteristic variable information value so as to optimize the prediction accuracy of the algorithm model. Through calculation, we noted the weight contribution rate of five characteristic variables to be the highest. Including total day charge, total day minutes customer service calls, international plan, and number of voicemail messages, linear regression, decision tree, Bayesian, artificial neural network, and support vector machine are used to predict customer churn on the customer dataset published by telecom companies. The experimental results are used to test the performance of the algorithm model.Results: It is found that the characteristic variables calculated after optimization are put into multialgorithm models to predict the churn of telecom customers. Finally, it is found that it is better for the optimized characteristic variables to use the decision tree algorithm model to predict the loss of telecom customers.

Broadband internet and enterprise innovation

Based on microdata from China's listed companies and macrodata for broadband internet access in prefecture-level cities, this paper explores the relationship between broadband internet and enterprise innovation. Using the change in market concentration caused by the North–South separation reform of China Telecom in 2002 as an instrumental variable, the results show that in general, a 1% increase in broadband internet access results in a 1.395% increase in the number of corporate patents. Specifically, the number of valid patents, patent citations and valid patent citations, reflecting patent quality, increases by 1.499%, 0.920% and 0.763%, respectively. The mechanistic analysis shows that broadband internet access contributes to increasing the number of R&D personnel and personal innovation efficiency, enhancing enterprises' willingness to innovate, and easing financing constraints. Further analysis suggests that broadband internet access mainly promotes invention patents rather than design patents. The innovation effect is more evident among high-tech, inventor-intensive, state-owned enterprises and enterprises located in the non-southeastern coastal region of China.