The upgrade is designed to support the Broadband China programme, which aims to deliver high-speed broadband connections to more than 250 million urban and rural homes in the country by 2015.
Alcatel-Lucent’s local subsidiary Shanghai Bell has been selected as the main provider for the deployment of converged optical transport network and wavelength division multiplexing technology. The vendor won 70% market share in the 10G sector during China Telecom’s most recent bidding process.
Shanghai Bell will increase China Telecom’s optical transport network capacity, expanding its reach to all of China’s major cities. This will enable the carrier to reach more consumers and businesses with its fixed-line broadband access network and increase availability of 3G and Wifi-based wireless broadband services.
“Chinese consumers and businesses are demanding increasingly sophisticated services requiring more and more bandwidth. As importantly, China has set aggressive targets to expand broadband availability to underserved segments of the society. Our optical technology will enable China Telecom to address these critical demands cost-effectively today, and lay the groundwork for the future expansion and acceleration of their network to support 100G transport in the future,” said Rajeev Singh-Molares, president, Asia-Pacific for Alcatel-Lucent.
Molares also revealed that China Telecom is to carry out a large scale deployment of 100Gbps technology on its network in the coming years, and hinted that Alcatel was confident in being selected for the contract.
