Huawei tapped to supply China Telecom’s ROADM WDM backbone

Huawei said it has exclusively won the bid for China Telecom’s ROADM Network Project in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River, which it says is also the first intelligent ROADM WDM backbone network to be built in China.

Huawei said the ROADM project marks the beginning of China Telecom’s migration to an intelligent all-optical backbone transport network, as well as a step forward for the telco’s “CTNET2025” network transformation strategy.

The middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River is the fastest developing region in China, including its developments in the internet industry. With the emergence of cloud computing and big data and the ubiquity of new services for smart devices, smart homes, and IoT, the requirements for data storage and analysis is increasing at an exponential rate. Building a ROADM network in this region will significantly improve the security of China Telecom’s optical transport network and its network intelligence, and intelligent operation capabilities, providing better broadband user experience for internet enterprises, e-commerce, and government/enterprise customers, Huawei said.

The project covers 21 ROADM sites in Hubei, Jiangxi, Anhui, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Shanghai along the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River. Huawei said its CD-ROADM technology facilitates the provisioning of advantageous routes to upper-layer service networks, such as routes with one-hop transmission, full mesh interconnection, optimal path and latency, and rapid dynamic recovery. The project can satisfy the low latency and high performance requirements for DC private lines and VIP financial customers.

Wei Leping, deputy director of the MIIT’s Science & Technology Committee and director of China Telecom’s Science & Technology Committee, said that an all-optical network is the telco’s long-term goal, but it  won’t be achieved overnight, and there is still a long way to go. “When and only when 100% transport, switch, and access are realized in the optical domain, and ROADM and OXC are introduced to the switching layer can a network be called strictly all-optical.”