ZTE Helps Turkcell Deploy World’s First Commercial 12 THz WDM System

ZTE, in partnership with Turkcell, has deployed the industry’s first commercial optical transport network (OTN) supporting 12 THz ultra-wide frequency spectrum in Bursa, the fourth largest city in Turkey. The network will bring greater bandwidth capacity to Turkey, allowing Turkcell’s subscribers to enjoy high-speed internet access. 

As 5G network requires bandwidth several times higher than 4G network to cope with the explosive growth of network traffic, Turkcell decided to build an advanced metro WDM network. In July 2021, Turkcell exclusively selected ZTE to build its metro WDM network in Bursa.

For the WDM network, ZTE has provided its powerful OTN platform based on 1T backplane bandwidth, which substantially increases the network transmission capacity. ZTE’s ZXONE 9700 is a new universal switching OTN device oriented to 100G and beyond 100G transmission. It is applicable to the backbone core layer and metro networks and can fully meet operators’ requirements for transparent transmission, flexible scheduling, aggregation processing, and service management and monitoring of large-granularity data services. It uses the G2K subrack, which has a total cross-connect capacity of up to 10T and a single-slot backplane bandwidth of 1T, and the advanced universal cell switching platform to implement non-blocking cross-connect scheduling of ODUk, PKT, and VC services. The ZXMP M721 CX66A (E) is also used in this project. The ZXMP M721 metro WDM device is a compact OTN product applied to the aggregation and access layers of metro networks. With high integration and flexible service access, it can effectively save the equipment room space and power consumption, and significantly reduce the O&M costs.

Beyond 100G OTN is an inevitable choice to support the development of new services. In this project, ZTE employs the 200G PS-16QAM system to meet the customer’s metro network transmission requirements. The system uses the electrical domain shaping technology to improve the transmission capability and implement ultra-long-haul transmission, and supports smooth evolution to 400G. The application of the new technology significantly improves the transmission capability of beyond 100G. At the same time, ZTE has preset a C+L-band coupler on the metro WDM network to help Turkcell implement quick and smooth upgrade to multi-band. The spectrum bandwidth of the traditional C band is about 4 THz, while the spectrum bandwidth of the C+L band can increase to 12 THz. Therefore, the C+L band can offer the future bandwidth capacity improvement by 200% compared with the original standard 80-channel C band, providing stronger transmission capability without increasing fiber resource investments and fully meeting the future data network bandwidth demands of Turkcell.

In terms of system reliability, ZTE offers multiple protection mechanisms, such as control board 1+1 protection, power board 1+1 protection, subnetwork connection protection (SNCP) and WDM automatic switch optical network (WASON), to substantially improve service reliability and network intelligence.

To achieve intelligent O&M, ZTE employs colorless, directionless, contentionless and flexgrid (CDC-F) ROADM solution, which greatly improves the wavelength flexibility, reduces the stress on equipment boards, and simplifies the O&M. ZTE also provides automatic power optimization to achieve power equalization at the channel layer and the multiplex section layer. Optical time domain reflectometer (OTDR) is used to locate fiber faults within minutes, so as to realize automatic fiber protection and recovery. Meanwhile, ZTE’s ZENIC ONE system is adopted to manage the network. The system supports fast and automatic service provisioning and provides open southbound and northbound interfaces to improve the interoperability. It also supports intelligent fault prediction and analysis to reduce the fault location time, and enables automatic and proactive O&M to simplify O&M operations, thereby improving the efficiency and user experience.

It is worth mentioning that Netas, Turkey’s leading information and communication technologies company with ZTE as its main shareholder, provides the project service for the WDM project. The successful commercial 12 THz WDM project will speed up the future 5G network development of Turkcell in Turkey.

ZTE pays close attention to the development of networks as well as core demands of operators, and is committed to technological innovation and exploration in the telecom sector. Moving forward, ZTE will partner with Turkcell to make continuous innovations and drive the network digital transformation in Turkey.