Viewpoint
China Mobile held a press conference in Beijing to announce the commercial use of the world’s largest 400G all-optical premium transmission for intelligence. By the middle of this year, China Mobile expects to realize high-speed interconnection between eight hubs in the “East Data, West Computing” project. This will make it an carrier that provides the world’s first 400G all-optical inter-province backbone network, which features the largest scale and widest coverage among all backbone networks.
In 2022, China initiated the “East Data, West Computing” project. A series of policies was released to guide the collaborative development of computing and network resources, with optical transport capacity playing a vital role. Against this backdrop, there has been a concerted effort among all parties in the industry in the planning and deployment of all-optical transport capacity construction. High-quality all-optical transport capacity connects users, data, computing power, and applications, paving the way for high-quality growth of digital economy.
Li Huidi, Executive Vice President of China Mobile, said that the establishment and application of the first link of China Mobile’s 400G OTN inter-province backbone network signifies the start of the large-scale commercial use of backbone 400G OTN all-optical networks. The project uses more than 1900 sets of OTN devices in 135 cities across China to connect the eastern and western part of the country using optical networks, and as such is the largest of its kind in the world. With more than 30 PB of computing power scheduling capacity on the entire network and less than 20 ms latency between hubs, China Mobile has developed powerful transmission capability to construct the high-quality all-optical transport network spanning the entire country. In the future, the carrier will coordinate the deployment of game-changing technologies such as 5.5G, computing network, and artificial intelligence to promote the transformation from “+AI” to “AI+”, jointly build intelligent and inclusive new information services, drive the growth of new industries and models for digital intelligence, and accelerate the development of new productive forces. All this will benefit countless households and empower all kinds of industries.
At the conference, Huawei showcased the new Kepler OTN platform used by the first link of the 400G all-optical national backbone network (Beijing–Inner Mongolia), as well as the full series of ultra-high-speed 400G and NCE-T transport capacity map solutions.
Over the past decades, Huawei has been working closely with China Mobile.
- In 2019, Huawei helped China Mobile introduce the single-wavelength 200G transmission technology in the eastern region, initiating a phase of large-scale 200G construction across China.
- In June 2022, Huawei helped China Mobile verify the industry’s first C6T+L6T OTN solution featuring single-fiber ultra-broadband spectrum.
- In March 2023, Huawei helped China Mobile complete the lab verification of the first 32T 400G QPSK system.
- In June 2023, Huawei helped China Mobile achieve the longest 400G QPSK transmission distance ever on the live network — 6028 km, and win the only optical transmission award at European Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC), a top academic conference in the global optical communications field.
In the computing era, Huawei provides all-optical premium transmission network solution that supports 400G interconnect computing hubs, 100G to sites, and integrated scheduling of computing and network resources. In this way, the backbone and metro networks can be improved in all aspects, reinforcing computing with network connectivity and empowering various industries with computing power. Bob Chen, President of Huawei Optical Business Product Line, said, “In the future, Huawei will continue to invest in the optical transport field and cooperate with China Mobile in fields such as post-400G evolution, computing-network synergy, and AI+ to accelerate green technology innovation and the development of new productive forces, promoting digital intelligence.”
We must seize opportunities and get prepared for the future. Leveraging the world’s leading technologies, Huawei will work with carriers to build new communications infrastructure in the digital era, laying a solid foundation for the development of new productive forces and promoting the integrated growth of the digital economy and real economy on a larger scale and at a deeper level.
