Telefonica Mexico Movistar: Boosting Service Development with Ultra-High-Speed Optical Transport Network

Telefonica Mexico Movistar (TMM) is a subsidiary of the multinational operator Telefonica in Mexico. Telefonica Group provides telecommunications services for 21 countries across the world and its services cover 14 countries in Latin America.
The mobile brand Movistar has been widely known since it entered Mexico in 2010 as it provides high-quality mobile communications services for Mexico telecommunications market. Now TMM has become the second largest mobile operator in Mexico providing mobile communications services for over 25 million users.

Challenges and Requirements of MAN
In recent years, with the popularization of 4K ultra-high-definition video and gradual introduction of such new services as 8K and VR/AR, mobile networks are evolving from 4G to 5G; the access rate per unit area is expected to increase by 1000 times; enterprise private line service granularities are changing to GE and larger ones. At the same time, TMM’s 4G networks have kept developing. The rapid growth of all the above services triggers a boom of bandwidth growth and brings huge challenges to network capacity and reliability.
The bandwidth bottleneck of the metro core aggregation network as a basic network will highly restrict future service expandability. Future metro DWDM networks will evolve towards ultra-high-speed 200 Gbps, 400 Gbps and even 1 Tbps. To cope with continuous expansion of 4G networks and huge challenges and fierce competition in the pending 5G, big data and big video era, TMM is in urgent need to upgrade its existing hybrid 10G/40G metro DWDM system by introducing new technologies and solutions to improve the metro core aggregation network capacity and performance. Already deployed for nearly 8 years, TMM’s existing DWDM network cannot be upgraded to support beyond-100G nor meet the requirements of future-orient metro networks. Besides, Mexico is in a seismic belt where earthquakes constantly take place, so network disconnection frequently occurs, which makes network operation and maintenance (O&M) difficult. Therefore, in view of the problems of the existing network, TMM plans to build a new metro core DWDM network to improve network reliability and reduce O&M difficulty while elevating DWDM network capacity and performance.

ZTE Helps TMM Build Metro OTN
TMM initiated a public tender focusing on new cutting-edge technologies and product performance in March 2017 and attracted major optical transport equipment providers. After three months’ technology competition, ZTE exclusively won the beyond-100G metro DWDM project of TMM. This network covers three core cities of Mexico: Mexico City, Monterrey and Guadalajara. In November 2017, ZTE and TMM announced commercialization of the network that is the first 5G-oriented beyond-100G metro core DWDM network supporting WASON in Mexico. In February 2018, TMM invited ZTE to participate in TMM Open House 2018, to communicate with them about the new technologies and solutions for this metro DWDM network.
In the project, ZTE provides the ZXONE 9700, an ultra-large-capacity E-OTN device for TMM. It employs ODUK/Packet/VC unified cross-connect platform and new-generation high-speed coherent communication technology and supports 100G/beyond-100G transmission rates and CD-F ROADM function. Employing WASON protection, it supports smooth upgrade to SDN in the future to improve network reliability and security. At the same time, it is loaded with OTDR, OSA and Ethernet service aggregation processing functions to substantially reduce the O&M difficulty of fiber networks and Capex of the customer. The solution covers all scenarios of the operator from the edge aggregation layer to the backbone core layer, fully meeting the requirements of TMM for  transparent transmission, flexible scheduling, aggregation processing, management and monitoring of mass data services. ZTE is dedicated to building a high-quality network featuring low power consumption, high reliability, large bandwidth, low latency and ease of maintenance to meet the traffic growth requirement of TMM in the coming five to ten years, so that it can better adapt to future service development and smooth evolution

Ultra-Large-Capacity Network
With industry-leading 200G PM-16QAM technology and CD-F ROADM technology, ZTE helps TMM build the first metro core DWDM network based on 37.5 GHz spacing in Mexico. This network can provide 53×400G or 106×200G, so that the system capacity can reach 21.2 Tbps, 25% higher than that of a 50 GHz network system.
 
High-Reliability Network
As the political and economic center, Mexico City is loaded with wavelength automatically switched optical network (WASON) in its core network area. WASON together with the full-mesh network design makes optical network transport more intelligent. The intelligent switchover mechanism can flexibly cope with various network emergencies, effectively reduce service interruption time caused by frequent fiber disconnection, shorten service deployment time, enhance service survivability and improve network resource utilization and network scheduling efficiency.

High-Efficiency Aggregation Network
The network is deployed with the Ethernet Layer 2 switching function, which compresses bandwidth by Layer 2 aggregation processing of client-side Ethernet cards to reduce transmission costs.  
The network supports VC4/VC12 centralized cross-connect aggregation and provides a more convenient transport solution for SDH network migration and transformation and private line service transport, which makes the network flatter and the management simpler. 

Fast and Simplified O&M
Optical time domain reflectometer (OTDR) and optical spectrum analysis (OSA) functions provided by ZTE help TMM reduce the O&M difficulty, improve operation and maintenance efficiency and reduce OPEX. The embedded high-performance OTDR deployed by ZTE can monitor fiber parameters and fault points in all spans and notify the fault information to network maintenance personnel in real time, highly improving network maintainability and substantially reducing fault restoration time. 
 
With substantially increased network capacity, TMM's new beyond-100G metro DWDM network can reduce O&M difficulty, improve O&M efficiency and enhance network survivability by the use of cutting-edge technologies. The reliable optical transport network will boost the development of TMM's 3G/LTE services.