Recently, China Unicom, Inner Mongolia Branch (China Unicom Inner Mongolia for short) adopted Huawei OptiX Alps-WDM to establish an E2E ROADM+100G OTN network from the county aggregation site to access sites in town. This network provides transmission capacity with 100G ultra-high bandwidth and significantly reduces equipment footprint and device power consumption. The commercial deployment has paved the way for Inner Mongolia to construct premium new digital information infrastructure, accelerating the digitalization and information-enabled services in rural areas.
In response to China Unicom's strategy of "Strengthen and Solidify, Comply and Innovate, Converge and Open Up", China Unicom Inner Mongolia inspires innovation and continues to provide customers with premium network services. As the "digital village" program ramps up, digitalization starts to gain traction in Inner Mongolia. Smart platforms enable real-time checks on changes in team building, agriculture, and urban construction, as well as enabling real-time release of various warning information. This helps to form a new model of smart platforms managing rural areas; satellite remote sensing can be used to check crop growth, and mobile apps enable remote irrigation, fertilizing, and smart planting; digitalization is increasingly driving development in rural areas, evidenced by the continuous emergence of interactive videos, network convergence (the provision of telephone, video and data communication services within a single network), enterprise private lines, and live broadcast systems.
Such rapid digitalization has contributed to traffic surges, placing higher demands on bandwidth as well as efficient configuration and operation of network devices. Traditional county/town-oriented 10G WDM systems cannot satisfy the fast-growing traffic demand. Further compounding this issue, they suffer from complex fiber connections between optical-layer boards, severe device stacking, and high requirements for equipment room space, energy consumption, and O&M. All of this urgently calls for green and efficient new networks with high bandwidth and easy O&M. Moreover, covering a huge geographical area and suffering from unbalanced network development, Inner Mongolia is in dire need of building an efficient network with low cost.
To coordinate with the development of multiple services and efficiently construct networks, Inner Mongolia has adopted Huawei OptiX Alps-WDM. This solution significantly improves the resource utilization efficiency on the entire network through multi-ring wavelength sharing as well as on-demand resource adjustment and scheduling. It also implements 100G to site, meeting OLT, PeOTN, and 5G's requirement of carrying various services. The current equipment room footprint and power consumption can be reduced by over 50% through E2E ROADM+OTN network construction, one-hop connection at the optical layer, and flexible scheduling at the electric layer. And by leveraging automation capabilities, this solution can quickly meet service provisioning requirements and improve O&M efficiency.
Looking ahead, China Unicom Inner Mongolia will continue promoting the application of innovative network technologies, actively construct optical transport networks supporting smooth capacity expansion, and help traditional agricultural, pastoral, and industrial areas effectively apply information technologies. Doing so will enable smart services across all phases, thereby contributing to the continuous advancement of "digital village".
