Alcatel-Lucent wins network deals with China Mobile and China Unicom

Alcatel-Lucent has won major deals to supply both China Unicom and China Mobile with its core routing equipment. Alcatel is to install its 7950 XRS model into China Mobile’s national IP backbone CMET. Meanwhile, it is supplying the same model to China Unicom as it builds metro networks of nine cities within the Jiangsu, Shandong, Jiangxi, Qinghai and Inner Mongolia provinces.

China Mobile’s CMET serves the world’s largest subscriber base and metro networks and Alcatel’s core router will help meet the growing demand for ultra-broadband from 820 million subscribers over the next decade. As China Mobile adopts 4G LTE wireless and cloud-based video services and the Internet of Things creates even more data traffic China Mobile expects capacity to reach 180 terabits by 2017 and 500 terabits by 2020.

Alcatel-Lucent has been briefed to simplify the network structure and manage costs by creating a flexible, intelligent network. The new router installation follows previous 7950 XRS Core Router deployments as China Mobile builds a 400G interface into its core backbone next generation Ethernet network. Installation is planned to finish by 2017.

It is also helping China Unicom meet high-traffic demand in nine Chinese cities as consumers demand high-bandwidth cloud-based video services. China Unicom has a growing base of 400 million fixed and mobile broadband subscribers.

The 7950 XRS IP Core Router is to be installed in 14 metro network nodes in nine cities. These can eventually evolve to 400G interfaces in its metro backbone network. This agreement expands on Alcatel-Lucent’s 2014 announcement of its selection as the supplier for the China Unicom 2014 IP metro network core router central bid.

Meanwhile, in another development affecting the China Broadband Plan, Huawei and China Unicom have announced that the Huawei Active Antenna Unit (AAU) solution will be commercially deployed in China’s Xinjiang Province to build out Xinjiang Unicom’s mobile broadband (MBB) network.

Xinjiang Unicom’s network deployment strategy priority is to complete 4G network coverage in urban areas as quickly as possible but, as building construction projects hinder progress, coverage by its 3G network is lacking in some areas. The Huawei AAU will help Xinjiang Unicom to maximise 4G network performance and improve inadequate 3G network coverage in urban areas.

The China Broadband Plan aims to provide broadband access to all urban and rural areas in the country by 2020 with a minimum of 50 Mbps in urban areas and 12 Mbps in rural areas.