China continued its drive with full steam ahead on 5G technology. The country is rolling out the world’s largest 5G network, which will reshape the connectivity and spur a digital revolution in all walks of life. China’s leadership in 5G era is contributed by the three major telecom operators along with the powerful support from the innovative technology leaders such as ZTE Corporation. As a pioneer making strides in indigenous innovations and practice, ZTE is one of the top holders of standard-essential 5G patents among the top global suppliers of 5G equipment.

ZTE has been widely recognized in the industry as one of the global leaders in transport network market. With more than 600 100G and B100G OTN networks by now, based on the latest reports from Dell’ Oro Group, the trusted source for market information about the telecommunications and networks industries, ZTE ranks No.3 in the global optical transport equipment market in 2020. ZTE’s OTN solution has been successfully deployed in many large-scale projects and lighting the networks of many globally leading multinational telecom operators such as Telenor, Ooredoo, VEON, MTN and Telefonica in South Korea, Indonesia, India, Thailand, Brazil, and Columbia, etc.

ZTE helped China Mobile build the world’s largest 200G OTN commercial network, covering 19 provinces in China, with the total link length over 50,000 km. At the same time, it has assisted China Telecom in building the world’s largest all-optical ROADM network. Besdies, It has worked with China Telecom deploy the industry’s first commercial trial of 400G OTN cluster system in March 2020, supporting maximum 25.6G capacity, 320% of that of a 100G system.

ZTE has actively participated in digital economy construction in Africa.
It has built advanced optical transmission networks in Egypt, Morocco, Libya, Algeria, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Zambia, DR Congo, Congo-Brazzaville, etc.

With the innovation achievements, ZTE has been highly recognized in the industry.
In October 2020, ZTE & China Mobile have been rewarded Best Enterprise Private Line Solution Award, in recognition of their cloud-managed intelligent OTN enterprise private line, at Broadband World Forum (BBWF) 2020.
In March 2020, ZTE’s E-OTN solution has been granted the Optical Network Innovation award at the Optical Networking and Communication Conference & Exhibition (OFC) 2020 by Lightwave, a well-known media firm in optical networking.
In January 2019, ZTE won the Industry Leader Award at Next Generation Optical Forum (NGOF) for ZTE’s packet enhanced OTN 5G transport solution.

“ZTE’s transport network technology evolves in the end-to-end application scenarios, such as 5G Backhaul, OTN, and data center. With rich network construction experience as well as key innovative technologies, ZTE can provide the optimal network solutions for our customers. By now ZTE has completed more than 50 commercial 5G transport networks and field tests all around the world.” Said by Mr. Zhang Zhenchao,General Manager of International Marketing of Transport Network ,ZTE Corporation.

ZTE together with a leading industry analysis provider GlobalData has jointly released the White Paper on Precision 5G Transport on 26 February 2021. The white paper sheds light on the new changes of 5G network architecture and new requirements for the transport network, describes how to use the innovative precision 5G transport network solution to address the major challenges brought about by new services. Also, it provides comprehensive technical support and recommendations for specific key technologies.

Talking about ZTE Transport Network, 5G Flexhaul and 5G OTN are the main solutions of ZTE.

For 5G Flexhaul, Firstly ZTE supports the largest capacity for 5G transport. With the highest 200GE networking capability, ZTE’s commercially deployed networks consume 50% less slots than others. Secondly ZTE provides the highest core performance. The latency test result is 10% lower than that in 4G network, and 60% lower than the average. Its power consumption is 17% lower than average. Thirdly ZTE develops the innovative FlexE-based hard slicing solution to provide ultra-large and expansible bandwidth, enable low-latency (less than 1µs) and high-reliability (protection switching within 10ms) service transport to meet massive demanding requirements of different 5G application scenarios and services.

For 5G OTN, Firstly ZTE provides the OTN platform with the highest integration, 2T per slot and 128T switching capacity that can implement efficient transport of L0-L3 services. It reduces Gbits cost & power consumption, and reduces customer’s network construction investments. Secondly with ZTE’s unique Flex Shaping , the transmission distance and quantity of WSS (Wavelength Selective Switch) cascading can be significantly increased. ZTE keeps ultra-long transmission records in 100G, 200G, 400G, and achieves 5,600km transmission distance of simulating 600G in lab. Thirdly ZTE can deploy port-level permission & domain-based function and network self-healing in network management, maintenance and optimization. In the future, ZTE will employ AI and big data analysis to deploy mirroring network simulation to optimize the network, so as to help the operator improve the O&M efficiency and reduce the error rate.

Mr. Zhang Zhenchao added “ZTE is dedicated to building a new ecosystem and exploring new business models. ZTE has actively carried out a large number of 5G industrial collaborations with our partners. We believe our innovation technologies will bring exponential growth for both ZTE and our customers. Flying together, we will embrace the big bright future of the transport network evolution.”