Keep One Step Ahead and Face the Future

--Chen Jie, Vice President of ZTE Corporation, Talks About ZTE´s NGN Development Strategy

Editor´s Note:

In the recent two years since ZTE´s NGN product series were put into market, ZTE has made remarkable achievements in the industry. Although a leading vendor in China, ZTE has been continuously doing business in a prudent and practical way, which has been recognized by government authorities, carriers and customers. In order to learn more about ZTE´s NGN development strategy, we interviewed Chen Jie, ZTE´s vice president and general manager of Network Division, about ZTE´s NGN development strategy, R&D advantages and progress.

ZTE´s NGN Development Strategy as the communication market is gradually opening up and the communication technology increasingly advances, it is inevitable that the existing mono-service and discrete telecom networks will evolve to all-service and integrated next generation networks (NGN).

As the capacity of traditional telecom networks gradually tends to reach its peak, the operator´s equipment purchase is shrinking, which accordingly weakens equipment manufacturers´ profit-making ability. Therefore, whether the manufacturers can grasp the current opportunity to form a definite NGN development strategy will directly decide their sustainable development abilities.

Since 1998, ZTE has gradually formed its own NGN development strategy through years of research. The strategy is to push the evolution process towards NGN from three directions: Softswitch, IPv6 and optical transmission. The final goal is to enable subscribers to flexibly access the multimedia services that integrate voice, data and video services and to promote the establishment of a mature NGN commercial model and the formation of a normally-operated industry chain.

The application of NGN at the user end actually becomes the most important and difficult task in the NGN development, because service demands are changing and the application directly serves subscribers. Therefore, ZTE pursues the development strategy of "walking on two legs" from three perspectives, which are the fixed NGN and mobile NGN (3G), the voice services and integrated multimedia services, and the traditional terminal access and intelligent terminal access, respectively.

ZTE´s Advantages in NGN Research and Development

ZTE is the first company to implement the commercial use of fixed NGN in China and has accumulated valuable experience for NGN´s extensive applications. In November 2001, after the opening of the experimental office, ZTE won a public bidding for the first domestic Softswitch commercial project—China Netcom Broadband Telephone Network Project by beating many foreign and domestic rivals, with its good brand image and product performance. Now the network has been smoothly running for more than one year. More and more services are launched over the network. The area covered has expanded from the initial 4 cities to present 10 cities.

ZTE has established several united research platforms to improve the efficiency of NGN research and development. ZTE has realized for a long time that convergence is the primary feature of NGN, which is different from the existing networks. Therefore, the common practice of "each does things in his own way" should be replaced by unified group work to share resources, thus achieving high flexibility and strong competence in the process of constructing NGN in the future. For this reason, ZTE has built up a group of teams such as the NGN core network element platform, NGN data service platform and NGN multimedia platform, etc. and concentrated its strength to implement and ensure the convergent feature of NGN products.

In the last few years, ZTE´s good track record has fully guaranteed the personnel and capital investment in the NGN development. Benefiting from advanced management and flexible business system, ZTE has maintained high-speed sustained growth for more than ten years. Even in the year of 2002, known as "a winter of the telecom industry", ZTE circumvented the risk brought by the operator´s large scale cut in investment and still had good results due to numerous diversified products, which obtained unanimous recognition from markets and governments. This has not only laid a foundation for ZTE´s further growth, but also provided the conditions for ZTE to put more personnel and capital investment in the NGN project.

Progress of ZTE´s NGN Research and Development

ZTE began its NGN research in 1998. Its USA branch did a lot of preliminary research in NGN development and brought forward a scientific, integrated and systematic feasiblity study report to provide an important decision-making reference for ZTE Corporation.

In March 2000, ZTE launched its NGN project. In June 2001, ZTE opened its first Softswitch trial office (Phase One) for Ningbo Netcom in Zhejiang province. In November 2001, ZTE obtained the first  Softswitch license from the Ministry of Information Industry to enter the existing networks in China. In June 2002, ZTE completed the construction of the first Softswitch-based commercial network in China. Currently, the network construction of Phase Two is approaching completion.

ZTE has made great progress and achievements in NGN research and development, and built up a good brand image, which plays a positive role in promoting the development of ZTE´s other products. Generally, the progress is reflected by the following products:

(1) Fixed voice products

(2) Fixed multimedia products

(3) Applicable 3G products

(4) NGN products with all-IP architecture

Future of ZTE´s NGN

As the process of the global economic integration is accelerated and the commitments of China´s entry into WTO are gradually fulfilled, the reform of Chinese telecom system is proceeding in full swing. Confronted with severe market competition and customer groups with high self-protection awareness, telecom operators are making great efforts to transform business concepts. Services of excellent quality and reasonable price will further become a magic weapon for telecom operators in winning market share.

Since NGN meets the operators´ demands very well, not only new operators give it a lot of attention, but also traditional operators express great interest. As the all-service operation concept is gradually emerging, how to quickly get into new operation fields is also placed on the agenda by related operators. And herein lies the advantages of NGN.

Currently, there are no overwhelming difficulties and problems in NGN technology. The urgent work is focused on how to build up a feasible commercial operation model and consequently form a benign cycle and "multi- win" industry chain. Though the complete settlement of these problems is time taking, ZTE firmly believes the future of NGN will be bright and the foreground will be expansive. ZTE is committed to make greater contributions to the construction and development of NGN—a grand system project.