China Mobile Yunnan Builds a Green All-Optical Network to Boost the Development of Digital Yunnan

In the next five years, Yunnan will focus on both digital transformation and building an ecological civilization.

January 11, 2022

5 Min Read
China Mobile Yunnan Builds a Green All-Optical Network to Boost the Development of Digital Yunnan

In 2021, Yunnan, the most southwestern province in China, proposed a strategic development goal for the province — Digital Yunnan. To realize this goal, Yunnan must follow the development path to resource digitalization, industry digitalization, digital industrialization, and digital governance and use scenario-specific applications to make breakthroughs. At the same time, Yunnan is promoting green production and lifestyles, leading in ecological protection, environmental quality, and resource utilization among all cities in China.

In the next five years, Yunnan will focus on both digital transformation and building an ecological civilization. The province is the most ethnically diverse in the country and endowed with beautiful mountain areas. Based on these features, Yunnan should become a major channel for South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA).

China Mobile Yunnan is a major driver in the implementation of the cyber power and the Digital China strategies. It set a goal for new urbanization with Yunnan's development as the focus, Kunming (the capital of Yunnan) as the central city, metropolitan areas as the core, city groups as the main form, and counties as the important carrier. The operator is proactively building a showcase for the all-optical smart city in Western China.

Building an all-optical smart city showcase in Western China

As a key part of the digital infrastructure, gigabit optical networks are becoming more and more important for supporting economic and social development. These networks provide gigabit broadband and all-optical transmission. Upgrading to gigabit broadband can tremendously improve the broadband access rate of homes and enterprises and support the digital application innovation of more homes and SMEs, and accelerating the construction of all-optical networks can increase the coverage density of OTN nodes.

Gigabit optical networks build a solid foundation for smart cities. All-optical smart cities can spark numerous city service innovations in diversified application scenarios, including digital government, digital healthcare, digital finance, enterprise cloudification, smart education, live streaming, and safe cities.

Based on the strategic plan of building Smart Kunming, Digital Yunnan, and Southeast Asia's Digital Hub, China Mobile Yunnan has built 1 ms, 3 ms, and 9 ms latency circles to cover Kunming, central Yunnan, and South Asia and Southeast Asia regions, respectively. The network will support Kunming's digital transformation, drive the development of Yunnan's digital economy, and help establish an economic sphere covering South Asia and Southeast Asia.

The 1 ms latency circle in Kunming improves the "city brain", supports the digitalization of city governance, speeds up the cloudification of various industries, and supports digital life applications, like Internet hospitals and smart campuses. OTN sites are deployed to provide wide coverage in the city and build a ubiquitous premium all-optical network for Smart Kunming.

The 3 ms latency circle in central Yunnan provides a powerful, high-quality, all-optical base for the integrated big data center system in the province. This promotes the integrated development of Kunming-centered areas in Yunnan. Cutting-edge technologies like optical cross-connect (OXC) and 200G are used to increase the capacity of digital transmission more than ten-fold with lower energy consumption, supporting the development of Digital Yunnan.

The 9 ms latency circle in South Asia and Southeast Asia regions will make Kunming become an international digital hub of Southeast Asia. This boosts China Mobile's international communications service capability and strengthens the facility interconnection, trading, financing, and relations between Yunnan and the two regions to build Southeast Asia's Digital Hub.

Green all-optical network helps build an eco-friendly Yunnan

China Mobile Yunnan has built an all-optical metro network covering the whole of Kunming. By using an ultra-broadband and simplified all-optical architecture, China Mobile Yunnan improves the network bearing capability while greatly reducing the energy consumption, helping achieve the target of building a green network so as to realize the carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals.

Over 15 all-optical switching OXC nodes have been deployed in Kunming, building a full-mesh metro core architecture. These nodes work with the three core data centers in the city to unleash the value of computing power based on ultra-high transmission capacity. OXC devices reduce the footprint of equipment rooms by 80% and slash the energy consumed by devices by 60%. As a result, China Mobile Yunnan has removed more than 80 core devices that are no longer needed, which will save more than 1.4 million kWh of electricity each year.

Widely deployed OTN sites support OLT uplink, which shortens the service access distance by 40%, doubles the bearer reliability, and dramatically increases the egress bandwidth capacity of OLTs. In addition, these OTN sites meet the reliable bearing requirements in densely-populated urban areas where BRASs and CDN nodes need to be moved downstream, bringing Internet content closer to users. This ensures high-quality and reliable bearing of home broadband services and reduces fiber resources required by half.

For enterprise users, China Mobile Yunnan has sped up the evolution from traditional SDH private lines to OTN private lines. This greatly improves the capability of private line services and reduces the power consumed by devices by over 40%, boosting eco-friendly and digital transformation of enterprises.

In addition to the eco-friendly and energy-saving evolution of network devices, China Mobile Yunnan is also focusing on developing green data centers. It improves direct interconnection and collaboration between OXC and Internet Data Center (IDC) devices to build a lossless transmission network between data centers. With ultra-low latency and highly reliable transmission, this network can maximize the value of computing resources and improve computing efficiency, saving energy for data centers. The operator has supported real-time data synchronization between the Asian elephant warning center in Xishuangbanna and the research center of the Kunming forestry and grassland administration to protect wild animals in these areas.

China Mobile Yunnan will continuously deepen the construction of all-optical smart cities, extend OTN nodes to the edge of cities, and improve the coverage of OTN nodes to fully support the high-quality economic and social development of Yunnan.

This content is sponsored by Huawei and China Mobile Yunnan.

Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd

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