A country of the size and population of China faces unprecedented challenges when it elects to upgrade its network from legacy PSTN systems, and to provide coverage in areas which are currently unserved or underserved. We have addressed the challenges beyond the Great Wall before. But now, as part of its twelfth Five-Year Plan (2011-15), China aims to extend FTTH coverage to 100 million users.
Accordingly, China Telecom has embarked on a new project “Broadband China, Fibre Cities”, which aims to bring “blazingly fast” broadband services – up to 50Mbps – to over 26 million people in China this year. Alcatel-Lucent will be implementing its plan to install a fibre-optic broadband access network across all Chinese cities in the next three years.
“By 2015, China Telecom will achieve a FTTH coverage of 100 million households and 30 million FTTH subscribers,” said Wei Leping, chairman of China Telecom’s science and technology committee. His intention is to “provide the urban users the experience of web surfing at the speed of light”.
Rajeev Singh-Molares, president of Alcatel-Lucent’s Asia-Pacific region, described the project as “another major milestone in the rapid modernisation of China’s telecoms landscape”.
China Telecom has also awarded Alcatel-Lucent Shanghai Bell the contract to deliver the first commercial deployment of IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) technology. This will deliver multimedia services to 120 million subscribers in Shanghai, Shandong, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Xinjiang and Sichuan provinces.
Xu Siu, deputy general manager of network development in China Telecom, describes the project as “a critical step in our transformation to a much more flexible, cost-effective, all-IP network.”
