China Mobile, the country's largest wireless carrier, has selected Nortel to upgrade its optical backbone network in Zhejiang province to address accelerating subscriber growth and prepare for migration to third generation (3G) services. Zhejiang Mobile, a provincial affiliate of China Mobile, operates the province-wide network.

Scheduled for completion by September 2005, the upgrade from Nortel is designed to significantly enhance Zhejiang Mobile's network by helping to improve network performance, flexibility, quality of service (QoS) and operational cost-effectiveness. Zhejiang Mobile expects its subscriber base to grow from 17 million at year-end 2004 to 20 million by late 2005.

Two Nortel optical platforms - Optical Cross Connect HDX Multiservice Switch and Optical Multiservice Edge (OME) 6500 - are being deployed in Zhejiang Mobile's provincial backbone network to optimize its existing network and increase network bandwidth in cost-effective increments.

Optical Cross Connect HDX, Nortel's flagship optical switching platform, offers unique network intelligence capabilities at the transport layer that facilitate automated set-up of end-to-end service paths across an optical switching network, enabling rapid delivery of differentiated services. Optical Cross Connect HDX supports flexible protection and restoration options, including ring and mesh, that are fully aligned with current SONET and SDH operational processes for Class of Service (CoS) differentiation that balances bandwidth efficiency and restoration speeds while providing superior flexibility in end-user Service Level Agreement (SLA) control.

The upgrade will include two Optical Cross Connect HDX switches as Hub nodes to be configured as multiple rings to optimize the backbone network. Nortel HDX cross connect capacity is scalable beyond one Terabit per second. In the Zhejiang Mobile deployment, the HDX will be provisioned initially at 640 Gigabits per second. The current HDX platform is also ready to support ASTN (Automatically Switched Transport Network) application through a simple system upgrade.

Similarly, the OME 6500 for Zhejiang Mobile will be used as a high-density service aggregator subtended under the Optical Connect HDX switch. OME 6500 is able to provide powerful next generation Layer two switching functions to support various kinds of Ethernet services. The strong VC12/VC3/VC4 cross connect capacity enables operators to deliver any future broadband voice, video and data 'triple play' services including IPTV.

Nortel OME 6500 is a next generation optical platform that converges multiple services and network layers onto a single platform. In addition to traditional electrical and optical interfaces, delivery is supported for Optical Ethernet, optical storage connectivity, and protocol- and bit-rate-transparent services. OME 6500 has been deployed in more than 35 networks around the world, including Bell Canada, Tiscali Italia, Telesur, Internet2, JiangXi Power (SPC), and SURFnet.

Deployed in more than 1,000 customer networks in 65 countries, Nortel's end-to-end optical networking portfolio includes next generation SONET/SDH, optical switching, wave division multiplexing and Optical Ethernet products. Nortel has deployed more than 290,000 optical network elements globally. Nortel was the market share leader in DWDM transport for the fifth year in a row as of year-end 2004, according to the Dell'Oro Group.