This year, the network operator giant China Unicom makes a series of activities in the field of blockchain standard internationalization. In March 2017, at the meetings of ITU-T Study Group 20, China Unicom led the establishment of a global first international standard project related to blockchain and Internet of things, named Y.IoT-BoT-fw “Framework of blockchain of things as decentralized service platform”. This standard project has been supported by more than 10 companies and originations (such as China Mobile, ZTE, MIIT, Alibaba, ETRI), and also gets strong supports from 6 national standard regulatory agencies including China, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Russia and South Korea.
In May, China Unicom actively supported and promoted the establishment of focus group of distributed ledger technology applications (FG DLT) under the ITU-T TSG.
In July, at the meetings of ITU-T FG DPM, China Unicom invited several blockchain experts to make speeches, and worked with its two important vendors ZTE and Huawei to undertake all the new standard projects as related to blockchains at the meeting.
That causes many doubts. Blockchain is actually used in many fields now, but what benefits it could take to network operators? Why is China Unicom as a network operator so active in promoting the internationalization of the blockchain standards?
The answer seems to be in the speech provided by Mr. Xiongwei Jia, a standard expert of China Unicom, at the July meeting of ITU FG DPM. Mr. Xiongwei Jia mentioned in his speech, “In the forthcoming era of all things interconnected, if still using current existing network architectures, the networks will be difficult to serve hundreds of millions of devices and things. We must find a new solution.” And he put forward an idea, “Edge computation improves the capabilities of edge nodes of the network, which moves the functionalities from the core nodes to the edge nodes. Blockchain makes edge nodes more independent, and Artificial Intelligence makes the edge nodes smarter. ” It turns out that the network operator wants to build new communication network for the forthcoming era of Internet of things, through integrating the technologies of edge computation, blockchain and artificial intelligence.
Coincidentally, China’s another network operator, China Telecom, had also established another blockchain-related standard project at ITU-T study group 16 in February 2017. Interesting, China’s three network operators, China Unicom, China Telecom and China Mobile, gathered in ITU-T, jointly promote the blockchain standards.
We also can get a glimpse of the end from the definition of ‘blockchain of things’ in the draft recommendation of ITU-T Y.IoT-BoT-fw. “‘Blockchain of things’ refers to a decentralized service platform, based on blockchain-related technologies, enabling the (physical and virtual) things to participate in and make transactions.” This definition is different from popular understanding on blockchain, but it is accepted soon in industry. Mr. Hequan Wu, a famous communication expert from Chinese Academy of Sciences, had ever quoted this definition at one of his special presentation for China (Shanghai) International Internet of Things Conference in April 2017.
Currently, blockchain technologies and applications are growing rapidly; there are many standards, but not compatible. This situation will limit its further development. The communications industry usually likes relatively high standard of standardization. Therefore, it is not difficult to understand that network operators are so proactive in promoting the internationalization of the blockchain standards.