Intelligent Bearer Network: Brilliant Win-Win Future

T-Mobile Austria is a wholly owned subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom. With more than four million users, it is the second largest operator in Austria. Since April 2011, the company has been operated by DT and has achieved great success.

Rapid expansion of new services has meant that T-Mobile Austria’s existing WDM/OTN network was starting to weaken in its capacity and reliability. The operator wanted to upgrade the WDM/OTN backbone to cater for increased business.

T-Mobile sought to build a mesh network that was capable of fast service deployment, wavelength/subwavelength flexible scheduling, better reliability, and that required lower capex.

Like many other operators worldwide, the company needed to prepare itself for a voracious need for extra bandwidth. It decided to design a 100 Gbit/s backbone to coincide with this year’s implementation of the IEEE 802.3ba standard, which defines Ethernet networks operating at more than 10 Gbit/s.

To ensure the backbone network was reliable, T-Mobile required dynamic service re-routing as well as traditional protection mechanisms for secondary faults.

Three-Step Network Upgrade

In 2010, a network construction plan was devised that comprised three steps and was based on the company’s existing network infrastructure.

In the first step, part of the sites on one link was built to bear end-to-end services. Device installation and service cutover were carried out on November 16, 2010.

The second phase involved an entire network upgrade, including an upgrade of those elements built in the first stage. A dynamic control plane was uploaded, and a mesh intelligent network was established. Commissioning of the network and service cutover were completed on December 18, 2011.

In the third phase, the 100 Gbit/s system was finished to meet the expanded service demands.

ZTE built an opto-electrical hybrid cross-connection solution based on reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer (ROADM) and optical data unit k (ODUk). The solution covered all sites in Austria and included a mesh network with ZTE’s ZXUCP A200 unified control plane supporting the WDM automatic switched optical network (WASON) control plane.

ZXUCP A200 provided protection and dynamic rerouting, which enables protection switchover when the fiber breaks down. There was a service-level agreement between ZTE and T-Mobile Austria to provide carrier-class service reliability at a reasonable cost.

The control plane has advanced automatic features, including topology discovery, and routing and creation of the service connection. End-to-end configuration is fast. An intelligent service wavelength scheduling solution makes more network resource available for use and reduces the operator’s capex.

Brilliant Win-Win Future

ZTE set up a professional handover team to benefit the customer by delivering a successful project as quickly as possible. ZTE and T-Mobile cooperated closely throughout the project. This helped ZTE figure out the customer’s demands quickly and arrange necessary lab tests and project handover.

Lab tests were successful, and the cutover was perfect. Phases one and two were completed ahead of time, demonstrating the power of ZTE’s handover capability and reinforcing its brand.

In addition, successful completion of the first two phases laid a solid foundation for the development of the step three.

Smooth Evolution Reduces Capex

The low-cost solution enabled a smooth evolution from 10G to 100G and made maximum use of existing network investments. It also made future capacity expansion possible. Most importantly, the customer’s capex was reduced.

ZTE has provided T-Mobile Austria with an intelligent way of reducing opex and capex. Roman Tiediens, project manager of the T-Mobile Austria transport project, described the ZTE DWDM backbone in this way: “ZTE tailored the services for us. It provided an industry-leading optical transport solution to save our investment.”

High reliability attracts more users. Features for avoiding fiber breakdown and a dual-host dual-gateway network management solution make the T-Mobile Austria network more reliable.

The intelligent control plane passed the user verification test. The first service cutover was completed, and existing Alcatel-Lucent devices were replaced. The services in phase two ran perfectly until the end of 2011, when the whole cutover was completed.

Rudiger Koster, T-Mobile Austria CTO wrote to ZTE to show his appreciation: “Network reliability has been 99.99% since the WASON was deployed. So far, all the devices in the network are running perfectly.”

ZTE’s principles are: “Precise service, focus on the customer” and “Create a brilliant win-win future.” Guided by these principles, ZTE has provided T-Mobile with the best services to help it be a more powerful force in the future.

ZTE and T-Mobile Austria recently won a fixed-network infrastructure innovation award from Global Telecoms Business for the WASON solution. ZTE’s WASON intelligent WDM/OTN network is the first of its kind to be deployed in Europe.

This was the second time ZTE had been honoured with a major prize in the commercial OTN. Last year, ZTE won the Infovision award at Broadband World Forum for the iOTN solution. ZTE’s OTN technology is highly recognised in the industry because it is innovative and performs extremely well.