According to industry insiders, following the launch of commercial ROADM automatic switched optical network in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River, China Telecom will continue to deploy ROADM optical networks in Southern and Northern China.
Judging from the network scale, the planed networks are larger than the existing ROADM optical network. In addition, China Telecom is planning to deploy corresponding ROADM optical networks in more areas across the country.
With the advent of 5G, Internet of things and the cloud era, the operators' networks need not only greater capacity, but also shorter time-delay, more flexibility and agile launch and scheduling ability, as well as more robust survivability.
The ROADM optical network adopts the optical layer dynamic routing technology, tunable optical upper and lower path switching nodes with high dimension and flexible grid function, which is independent of wavelength, direction and without blocking, it interconnects all the web sites in the regional network and achieves direct reaching and shortest time-delay of transmission of the wavelength-level services.
The director of China Telecom Science and Technology Committee Wei Leping said that ROADM starts the strategic upgrades from electric nodes to optical nodes and from point-to-point links to optical layer networking, which fundamentally breaks the bottleneck of network node capacity and marks the optical network entering full-optical network 2.0 era (automatic switched optical network) from 1.0 era (full optical fiber network). It is also a key step to achieve the CTNet 2025 network reconfiguration target revolution featured by “Simple, Agile, Open and Intensive”, which will not only bring profound changes in the transmission network layers, but also promote the growth of relevant industrial chains.