ZTE begins commercial trial of 400G OTN cluster system

Chinese telecom equipment maker ZTE on Thursday said it has started a commercial trial of 400G OTN cluster system, touted as an industry first, in cooperation with China Telecom’s Shenzhen branch.

The system is said to support a maximum 64-wavelength 400G and is claimed to have 3.2 times the capacity of a 100G system. ZTE said the system can effectively satisfy the requirements for cross-ring non-blocking scheduling of an enterprises’ private line.

The 400G OTN system claims to reduce difficulties incurred in the O&M of networks, save on O&M costs, and will assist with the stable operation of 5G networks. The cluster solution has been deployed at multiple super-core nodes in the network with each site capable of supporting 128 service slots and 64T cross-connect capacity.

ZTE said the solution satisfies the non-blocking scheduling requirements of a large number of small-granularity services brought by phasing out SDH equipment which will enable high-speed transportation of 5G, gigabit broadband, and enterprise private line services.

ZTE has deployed its flagship ZXONE 9700 OTN device, on which the CE band is deployed. The device supports a maximum network capacity of 25.6T, which will fulfil the network expansion demands of customers and will save on prior investments.

The project takes advantage of 32-degree ROADM optical–layer architecture which improves transport efficiency. The architecture supports MAN flatness and full-Mesh multi-directional connections, and supports one-hop transmission, which ZTE claimed, will reduce OTN service transport latency, improve user experience and will alleviate bandwidth load on MAN core nodes.