China Mobile to leverage Nokia equipment to build optical transport network
China Mobile has chosen Nokia to supply equipment for its regional optical transport network.
An optical transport network serves as a protocol for forwarding network messaging across optical fiber networks. It consists of a collection of optical network elements, which communicate with wavelength division multiplexing. China Mobile is currently building a new optical transport network, which the company said will help it improve data center interconnect, consumer broadband services and 4G backhaul.
“IP/optical integration enables the combination of state-of-the-art routing and optical transport technologies to provide a more agile, dynamic and integrated network with significant cost and performance synergies,” explained Kyle Hollasch, head of marketing for Nokia’s optical business, in an email exchange with RCR Wireless News. “In the short term, IP/optical integration removes operational and technological barriers that currently inflate overhead costs.”
Under the agreement, Nokia will provide China Mobile an integrated IP/optical solution capable of supporting virtualization and cloud technologies associated with 5G. In particular, Nokia’s 1830 Photonic Service Switch (PSS)-24x platform will serve as the core of China Mobile’s optical transport network. It combines massive switching scale with high performance optics powered by Nokia’s Photonic Service Engine technology.
“Virtualization and cloud technologies enable applications, services and network functions to be provisioned and modified far faster than traditional, more static technologies,” said Hollasch. “With RAN and Packet Core migrating to Cloud architectures in 5G, the IP/Optical network must have the flexibility and agility to interconnect them. Software-driven, programmable networks provide the mechanisms to do just this.”
The news followed China Mobile recently announcing it had chosen Nokia’s Nuage Networks Virtualized Services Platform (VSP) as the software-defined networking (SDN) platform for its public and private enterprise cloud services offering. Under the deal, China Mobile said it would use Nuage’s VSP to help expand its SDN support for new public, private and hybrid cloud services for its enterprise customers, including hosting workloads on either Kubernetes (K8S) containers or bare metal servers.
Nokia isn’t the only service provider to recently land a deal with China Mobile. Last week, for example, Aryaka announced a partnership with China Mobile International (CMI) to deliver what the company claims to be the first compliant global SD-WAN service for international companies with locations in China, and Chinese companies with a global presence. As part of the collaboration, China Mobile will sell a combined solution of Aryaka’s SD-WAN with CMI internet connectivity.
