The telecom industry’s first commercial 400 Gigabit per second (Gb/s) IP core network has been activated in Saudi Arabia by Chinese vendor Huawei and Saudi operator Mobily.
The network aims to bring a more diversified and efficient service experience to millions of UMTS, LTE, and FTTH users. The 400G IP core capabilities will enable a superior customer experience for UMTS/LTE, video, teleconferencing, machine-to-machine (M2M), and cloud computing services.
Data traffic from wireless broadband network services has grown from 163 to 750 terabytes per day in the region, and the technology will help support the heavy growth in demand for bandwidth by Mobily’s customers. By the end of 2013, the planned expansion of the fibre optics network will take the overall reach to 500,000 residential units.
“We aim to bring leading-edge technology and infrastructure offerings to our customers,” said Mr. Nasser AL Nasser, Chief Operation Officer, Mobily. “The new 400G IP core provides excellent performance and scalability, and will allow Mobily to continue to develop its services over the coming years.”
The network uses a Huawei NE5000E core router. As the world's first commercially available 400G core router, the NE5000E supports flexible networking of 100GE ports, 40GE ports, and 10GE ports to provide an ulta-large capacity of 400Gb/s per line card, and can be smoothly evolved to provide a Terabit-level capacity for the backbone network. In addition, power consumption of the 400G line card is within 1 W/G, keeping energy and investment costs low.
“Zha Jun, president of Huawei Fixed Network Business Unit, said: “Rapid development of mobile broadband and video services will generate tremendous traffic growth for backbone networks. Now is the time to apply 400G technology.”
