Ethio Telecom Builds 100G WDM Backbone Network for Rapid Development

Release Date:2017-03-13 By Xu Wei Click:

 

 

The Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia (hereinafter referred to as "Ethiopia") is a country in northeastern Africa. Ethiopia, at the center of the Horn of Africa, is bordered by Djibouti and Somalia to the east, Sudan to the northwest, Eritrea to the north and Kenya to the south. Mountains and plateaus make up the main landform of Ethiopia. Most of its territory is on the Ethiopian plateau, and its annual average temperature is 16°C. With more than 91 million people, it has Africa's second largest population. As a member of the African Union, Ethiopia is one of Africa's fastest growing economies.
Ethio Telecom is the only mobile operator in Ethiopia and one of the oldest telecom operators in Africa. Established in 1892, Ethio Telecom has a history of 125 years. As the only state-owned operator, it plays a key role in Ethiopia's continued development. Its business covers fixed-line, mobile communications and internet services. Since 2005, it has undergone a large-scale transformation and modernization.

 

Service Development of Ethio Telecom
Ethio Telecom has been in service since 1893, but the government began to pay attention to telecommunication service penetration and coverage in 1991. In 1997, Ethio Telecom launched dial-up services. In 2001, it achieved digital data network (DDN) connection. In 2005, it connected voice data and video data through multimedia. In the same year, it rolled out a 4,000 km fiber backbone network, but only 20,000 internet users were available.
In 2008, Ethio Telecom selected ZTE to build a new wireless network, and it invested USD 1.5 billion in this project. In 2011, Ethio Telecom began to deploy 3G networks for 1.7 million 3G users. In addition to 3G networks, it deployed 3.5G/3G+ networks and completed 4G coverage in some areas of the capital city, Addis Ababa. Now, its subscribers reach 9.4 million. From 1.7 million in 2011 to current 9.4 million, Ethio Telecom made a quantum leap.
Thanks to the new wireless network, Ethiopian villages have been covered by wireless services with a coverage ratio of 62.14% in 5 km radius. In recent years, the subscribers of Ethio Telecom have increased as fast as 30% annually. Currently, more and more Ethiopians are using internet to solve problems both at work and in life.
In Ethiopia, poverty alleviation is a top priority. The Ethiopian government spares no efforts to eradicate hunger and poverty, improve the quality of education and raise the level of health care. It developed a Growth and Transformation Plan (GTP), which is a medium term strategic framework for the five-year period (2010/11—2014/15). In the telecom sector, the government plans to launch broadband networks in rural areas and increase the penetration of internet to 55%. There are 160,000 villages in the country; the Ethiopian government aims to connect all of them within five years. It also tries to connect the schools via internet.

 

ZTE's Optical Network Solution
As a global leader in telecommunications and information technology, ZTE is committed to providing integrated end-to-end products and solutions for customers and partners. Over the years, ZTE has always been a strategic partner of Ethio Telecom, and has provided many high quality telecom services for Ethiopians. Therefore, the Ethiopian government and Ethio Telecom highly appraised ZTE and its products and services.
The original backbone network of Ethio Telecom was deployed by ZTE, and the average bandwidth utilization of this network has exceeded 70%. With the development of telecommunication services, it is urgent to build a new network to ease the bandwidth pressure. In 2014, Ethio Telecom began a tender for a national WDM backbone transmission network. At the beginning of 2016, Ethio Telecom finally selected ZTE to build the WDM backbone transmission network in the western and southern regions of Ethiopia.
In this project, ZTE's optical network solution is based on the 100G DWDM/OTN network, integrating intelligent WDM automatic switch optical network (WASON) and adopting industry-leading polarization-division multiplexing quadrature phase shift keying (PM-QPSK) modulation, coherent reception and software defined forward error correction (SD-FEC) key technologies. The transmission backbone network will be built to achieve a large-capacity OTN cross connection, optical network intelligent scheduling and ultra-long distance transmission, helping Ethio telecom respond to the business evolution in the future.
● 100G transmission performance: Compared with the existing 10G/40G optical transmission networks of Ethio Telecom,ZTE's 100G optical system adopts the advanced coding technology of coherent detection, the DSP algorithm and the third generation SD-FEC technology. With excellent optical signal to noise ratio (OSNR) tolerance index, it achieves more than 5,000km transmission without OEO processing, which increase the transmission capacity and reduces the unit cost by nearly 30%.
●    WASON platform and hybrid optical/electrical scheduling: Ethiopia's first WASON has been deployed by ZTE for Ethio Telecom. With WASON network, the optical network transmission becomes more intelligent, the service deployment time is shortened, and multiple recovery paths can be provided for critical services to improve network resource utilization. Meanwhile, the hybrid optical/electrical scheduling makes the backbone WDM network scheduling more efficient and creates end-to-end services easier.
●    High-reliability system architecture: With many years of engineering practice and powerful R&D strength in the field of optical network protection, ZTE's optical network solution supports multiple protection modes, including fiber, wavelength, sub-wavelength and L2 layer. Main control unit, power module unit and clock unit support redundant 1+1 hot standby. Cross-connect unit adopts the advanced cubic protection whose reliability is higher than ordinary 1+1 protection by more than three orders of magnitude, greatly improving equipment safety.
● Green operation and efficient energy-saving: ZTE's optical network equipment adopts the 28-nm AISC chip to reduce the overall heat and energy consumption. The advanced mechanical and electrical management mechanism is introduced to support the dormancy of circuit and optical modules, and reduce the energy consumption of idle modules. Ultra-high precision temperature measurement and intelligent cooling system dynamically adjusts fan speed according to the temperature value to control energy consumption while lowering the system operating temperature.
After Ethio Telecom selected ZTE to deploy its WDM backbone transmission network, ZTE gained 50 percent of the market share for the optical network, which consolidates it position as leader in the Ethiopian optical network market. The newly-built 100G WDM backbone transmission network increases the capacity by 10-fold, and helps Ethio Telecom develop its 3G, LTE and broadband services.
At the second World Internet Forum in early 2016, Abdulam Ademar Abeit, CEO of Ethio Telecom, said that ZTE was a trusted strategic partner of Ethio Telecom. He hoped that ZTE would continue to contribute to the telecom sector in Ethiopia and provide the best solutions and services for Ethiopians. He also said that Ethio Telecom would work with ZTE to promote the sustained service growth and the progress of the Ethiopian telecommunications market.