Jun 21, 2019
QLC Chain — The Gateway to 5G Revenue
On June 10th, QLC attended the first Telco Blockchain Forum and delivered the keynote presentation “How Blockchain Empowers Telecom Infrastructure Sharing”. This post is a summary of the presentation, together with a slide video as elaboration.
Watch it here
A review of the network evolution
We live in digital life, underpinned by something called the internet. Digital payments, sharing economy, social media and more.
When did it happen? Things began to change significantly during the 3G era. Facebook and other online platforms entered the mobile sector.
4G introduced a rich media experience. We seamlessly watch YouTube, Netflix or listen to Spotify. Network evolution is not just an evolution of speed, it is an evolution of the Internet-based business model. With the imminent arrival of 5G, it is no surprise that an explosion of new business models and a new era of connectivity is coming. Internet of Things, Virtual Reality, Connected cars, smart homes, and smart cities.
For operators, it means yet another major investment in the infrastructure, to upgrade networks and to purchase a new spectrum. It also means investing in Radio Access Network, transmission and core networks.
But what about the returns?
With a continuous increase in capital expenditure, consumers are not necessarily willing to pay more. Return on investment from 4G was not as great as with earlier generations.
Most importantly all those huge gains made by applications, as for example payments, content delivery or FinTech, are built on top of the operator’s infrastructure, but they are not harvested by the operator themselves, due to the limited billing model.
How to incentivize operators to upgrade the infrastructure, to achieve another leap of economic growth with 5G?
Blockchain as the future — QLC Chain’s initiatives
The solution that we propose is to implement a blockchain based technology that helps to lower the capital expenditures, to save billing loss and to bring up more business models.
This solution is capable of supporting various specific features that are suitable for the telecom industry, including a unique and trusted ID system, a billing and clearance platform for cross-carrier service and infrastructure sharing, and a blockchain based BOSS for swift billing.
QLC Chain is the next generation public chain for Network-as-a-Service (NaaS). QLC Chain is the world’s first infrastructure level public chain with embedded telecom service capabilities, including billing, security and the trusted Cross-Carrier Payment Systems (CCPS). Other than billing and clearance, QLC will also develop user identity authentication and authorization solutions for network access, as well as IPV6 P2P addressing functions, in the future. They are the essential parts of the QLC Chain’s mission which is to create a secure and trusted environment for telecom service providers at the same time to narrow down the digital divide by leveraging Distributed Ledger Technology, to deliver high-quality telecom service to the 4 billion unconnected people in the remote area. The QLC Chain benefits the QLC holders in the network services.
Business Application #1 — Digital ID
In the new BOSS system, we first assign Digital ID and confirm asset ownership for various devices like routers, IOT devices and smartphones.
On the ID part, our solution is to Issue eSIM Card that stores the private key and integrates with the WALLET function.
On the business side, with this flexible BOSS system, various services, including music, news and video conferences, can register on the chain and then broadcast to users. Users can access and trigger the smart contracts for consumption and payment.
Business Application #2 — Support Data Market
Another emerging trend is edge computing. Our devices are getting more and more powerful, so a lot of data processing and computing can happen locally. Major advantages are reduced latency and offloaded data centers. Co-location of transmission, storage and computing occurs.
As the Internet of Things will continue to expand, the amount of generated data will skyrocket. All devices will be connected, not only cars or watches but also vacuum cleaners and refrigerators.
All this data can be hugely valuable when properly analyzed, used for AI training and machine learning. So there is this demand for a trusted and secure data market. Consumers need to know their data is secure and are incentivized to share it. With the digital ID in place and flexible BOSS, data market can be realized.
Business Applications #3 — Clearance for operational cost saving
With the existing blockchain infrastructure, carriers can further lower the capex by conducting infrastructure sharing, including RAN, bandwidth, storage and data sharing.
This way, carriers can monetize the owned infrastructures and offer them to other telcos in need.
As 5G deployment starts, we will see more and more RAN sharing agreements coming across telcos.
As a result, the infrastructure can help with telco’s cost saving.
With the implementation of Blockchain, the telcos can track and bill accurately, save the cost generated from grey routing, as well as the third party clearance house fee for inter-carrier SMS, and data.
Also, it could be used as a new platform for MVNO wholesale, namely between the MVNO and the parent company.
Business Applications #4 — Payment
It is time for QLC Chain to help carriers catch up with blockchain based digital payment functions. With the advent of cryptocurrency and the concept of blockchain technologies, carriers have now been offered a unique opportunity to compete with the banking industry for the digital payments sector. Better than the conventional DCB, QLC public chain enabled digital payments will offer carriers more advantages by way of supporting carriers to issue their own stable coin.
QLC Chain will execute the payment and clearance functions for DCBs when the carriers connect with QLC Chain’s public network. At the same time, the public network will conduct inter-carrier clearance (e.g. roaming customers). For consumers, they don’t need to register or authorize credit cards in the App any longer. Blockchain enabled DCB will be simpler and easier as the user identification and authentication has been taken care of and also more likely to have ubiquitous access underpinned by Blockchain merchants onboarding.
Technology structure
In terms of technology structure, QLC Chain adopts the innovative multidimensional Block Lattice structure with programmed smart contracts on top of it, which is an industrial high-performance structure. The Directed Acyclic Graph structured architecture has high scalability with a transaction per second(TPS) number as high as 7,000. With QLC chain as the infrastructure, each operator around the world can issue their own token to enhance their competitiveness, increase credibility and at the same time lower the operating cost.
The testnet with explorer and wallet, recognized and praised by community members, peers and rating institutions, has already been online since October 2018. The team has the global SMS billing and clearance system that has the capability of facilitating 2 billion transactions per year.
In the A2P SMS industry, the clearance market is not as standardized and transparent as it is in the financial industry. The trustworthiness of agreements made between service providers, telcos, and other related parties have been the core pain points of the global SMS business model. With the first deliverable of the QLC Chain, the public ledger will smoothen the inter-carrier clearance process and provide a trusted layer for people’s everyday use of telecom services. In return, the infrastructure will benefit every consumer and smartphone user.
After the Forum Heavy Reading senior analyst James Crawshaw talks about how blockchain can be used to make, and save, money in the telecoms sector and identifies QLC Chain as one of the innovative startups in the sector.
Visit www.qlcchain.org to know more
