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Recently, Huawei announced plans to collaborate with China Mobile on an international and government/enterprise private transport network project. This will be the world's largest OTN private line network, and will be part of China Mobile's strategic layout in the private line market, especially in the premium private line segment for governments and large enterprises.
With increasing globalization and development of information and cloud services, private line requirements are increasing. In addition to operator 2C services (mobile services and broadband services), private line services will become another focus of the 2B market. In the private line market, valuable customers include governments and large enterprises such as financial institutions, both Chinese and international. These customers place very high requirements on private line quality. A premium private line must have the following "5A" characteristics:
- High availability: Link availability rate must be higher than 99.99%.
- Physical isolation: Services must be isolated from each other using hard pipes.
- All-online: Network resources must be visible in real time, and the network usage status accurate. Private line services are sold entirely online over an e-commerce platform. In the sales phase, marketable private line products are quickly confirmed. In the operation phase, performance and alarm information is visualized, achieving predictive and proactive O&M. Tenants can also query private line KPIs in real time.
- Agility: Service provisioning done within days, and online adjustment within minutes; service adjustment is hitless.
- Latency assurance: Private line latency can be detected, visualized, and planned. Private line trails are computed in terms of optimal latency and latency range, helping monetize latency.
Based on these requirements, China Mobile has high standards for network architecture and technologies.
In terms of network architecture, China Mobile requires:
Optimal latency: All service trails must be optimized to avoid convoluted routing caused by division of administrative regions, achieving optimal latency.
- Wide coverage: One OTN backbone network must cover 153 major cities in 31 administrative regions across China and seven POPs in the United States, UK, Japan, Singapore, and Germany. This avoids segment-by-segment service forwarding, resource coordination, and manual fiber connection caused by network segmentation. The VC-OTN on the access side is directly extended to end users, providing them with E2E OTN connections and minute-level provisioning of private line services.
- Most reliable network: The network is highly meshed, ensuring each important service node has at least three egress paths for reliability.
- Cloud-and-network synergy: Thanks to the optimized network architecture, China Mobile's government/enterprise OTN private line network can connect users to China Mobile's public cloud system, "Mobile Cloud," enabling one-hop connection through hard pipes to achieve optimal experience.
The VC-OTN, hitless adjustment of ODUflex (G.HAO), and optical-electrical synergy grooming technologies are introduced to meet user requirements and ensure future advancement and scalability. VC-OTN devices with SDH functions will be used to meet the requirements of 2M to 100G service access and transport as well as absolute hard pipe isolation between services. In addition, G.HAO and link capacity adjustment solution (LCAS) must be supported to implement in-service hitless adjustment of service bandwidth and provide optical-electrical synergetic grooming. The cloudified SOTN system will be used to manage and control ultra-large networks.
Huawei has long-term advantages in the OTN field and a deep understanding of private line transmission. In this project, Huawei will use the latest OXC and OTN cluster devices for the first time, achieving optical-electrical synergetic grooming and integrating resources across the entire network. The management and control system Network Cloud Engine (NCE) will implement fast provisioning of private line services, hitless adjustment within minutes, and minimum latency routing policy, meeting government and enterprise requirements. Thanks to its years of experience and cutting-edge technical solutions, Huawei has become China Mobile's sole partner in the international and government/enterprise private transport network (OTN) project.