On September 10th, People's Government of Sichuan Province held the ceremony of building the first domestic "full optical network province" in Chengdu. With the megacity Chengdu – with population of 15 million - has built the "full optical network city", it means that all the 21 cities in Sichuan have built full optical networks, and Sichuan became the first province that has built "full optical network" in China. This also means that Sichuan Province has said goodbye to "the traditional copper line communication stage" and stepped into the world's leading "full optical network" era.
With the construction of the first “full optical network” province, China Telecom has achieved full optical network coverage in all the cities and main villages and small towns in Sichuan, the traditional telephone switching equipment are shut down and taken out of the network, optical fiber broadband users have accounted for more than 90% of the total number. At present, Sichuan Province has formed a "leading 1000Mb, general 100Mb and starting 20Mb network” pattern, the average Internet bandwidth has reached 37.9Mbps, ranking in the first place in China.
It’s not easy for the construction of "full optical network" province, there are four difficulties merely in the construction of urban optical network, namely difficult to coordinate the construction, difficult to enter the residential area, difficult to get accession to the residence and difficult to supervise the network. In the vast rural areas, the stalemate of "urgent needs to overstepping the digital gap and imbalanced ratio of input and output" is also a challenge.
Faced with this situation, China Telecom initiatively took actions, on the one hand, it participated in the development of optical network accessing standards, and invited developers to introduce the new services of China Telecom; on the other hand, it gained supports of the government, which took the construction of broadband network into the daily work of government departments and actively applied for “broadband countryside” pilot province, finally Sichuan became one of the two pilot provinces.
With the completion of full optical network construction, Sichuan will become the new information highland in western China, and will play an important role in further eliminating of the digital gap between urban and rural areas, pushing the development of “Internet+” program and promoting the coordinated development of urban and rural areas. At the same time, it also has profound impact on the improvement of informatization level, elimination of poverty and improvement of people's livelihood.