Nanjing Telecom: Embracing the LTE Era with IP RAN

Nanjing is the capital of Jiangsu province, China, and has a population of about eight million people. Located in the lower Yangtze River basin, Nanjing has long been a national transportation and communications hub. It is also an outsourcing and software innovation hub in China.

China Telecom is a traditional fixed-network operator that has had a large number of terminal users since its early days of operation. To increase revenue in the wireless field, the Nanjing branch of China Telecom (Nanjing Telecom) continues to pour money into 3G and LTE networks and has chosen ZTE’s high-end bearer product, ZXCTN 9000-E, for its mobile backhaul networks.

After many years of network planning and optimization, Nanjing Telecom has completed its IP transformation on the radio side. However, to protect their investment in equipment and lower capex and opex, Nanjing Telecom has to allow 2G, 3G and 4G networks to exist together. When frequently upgrading, expanding, and cutting over the network, OAM personnel always have to consider long-term mobile network evolution and development. ZXCTN 9000-E is an IP RAN device with pure IP routing architecture. Combined with China Telecom’s L2VPN+L3VPN solution, it plays an important role in the construction of ultra-wideband bearer networks with high routing capacity.

Multi-NE Access

IP interfaces are used for base stations on the radio side; therefore, all base stations can be connected to IP RANs through the interfaces of the equipment at the access layer. The 10/100 Gbps ports of ZXCTN 9000-E are sufficient for the requirements of explosive traffic growth in the LTE era, and can be upgraded smoothly to 400G.

Rapid Service Deployment

In the LTE era, the number of eNodeBs is three times that in the 3G era. This means massive services need to be quickly deployed in existing networks. The bearer network, as the basis of mobile backhaul networks, should be able to flexibly handle changes in traffic transmission. The plug-and-play function in an IP RAN solution should eliminate the need for equipment at the access layer to be debugged and commissioned. This will greatly reduce engineering implementation expenses in IP RAN deployment. During software debugging and commissioning, basic services of all IP RAN devices on the network can be configured automatically by using the SNMP protocol and through collaboration with third-party network-management systems. This further reduces the difficulties in IP RAN service deployment.

High Performance and High Availability

With competition between China Telecom, China Mobile, and China Unicom heating up, both terminal users and OAM personnel expect more in terms of overall network quality. The ZXCTN 9000-E, incorporated with field-proven L2VPN+L3VPN IP RAN solution and high-performance commercial chips, enables carrier-class protection switching in the case of network failure. This greatly improves network stability and guarantees LTE services of Nanjing Telecom.