China Telecom trials 400G OTN cluster system with ZTE

ZTE Corporation announced it has deployed the industry’s first commercial trial of 400G OTN cluster system together with the Shenzhen Branch of China Telecom.
China Telecom investment
The system supports a maximum of 64-wavelength 400G, and its capacity is 3.2 times of that of a 100G system. It can effectively meet the needs for cross-ring non-blocking scheduling of an enterprise private line, reduce the difficulty of network O&M, and help with the high-speed and stable operation of 5G transport networks.

ZTE and the Shenzhen Branch of China Telecom deployed the industry’s first 400G OTN cluster solution at multiple super-core nodes in the network, each site supporting 128 service slots and 64T cross-connect capacity.

The solution satisfies the non-blocking scheduling requirements of a large number of small-granularity services brought by SDH equipment phasing out, effectively enabling high-speed transport of 5G, gigabit broadband and enterprise private line services, significantly reducing O&M difficulty and saving network O&M costs for customers.

ZTE’s flagship OTN device ZXONE 9700 supports a maximum network capacity of 25.6T, which is 3.2 times the capacity of a 100G system, fulfilling the demands of further network expansion and saving customer prior investment.

The project is also deployed with a 32-degree ROADM optical-layer architecture, in a bid to further improve transport efficiency. The architecture allows MAN flatness and full-Mesh multi-directional connections, and supports one-hop transmission, thus decreasing OTN service transport latency, improving user experience and alleviating bandwidth pressure on MAN core nodes.

ZTE has deployed more than 400 100G/B100G networks across the world with the total fiber length exceeding 400,000 km.

Dell’Oro Group says the market share of ZTE optical network devices increased 2.4 percent in 2019, becoming one of the two vendors with the largest increase.

The latest research report from Omdia says that ZTE ranked No.2 in global OTN switching market in 2019.