ZTE Quality IP Network Enabling India’s National Broadband Policy

On January 23, 2007, Indian President Dr. A P J Abdul Kalam proclaimed in his speech to the Congress that 2007 would be a year of Broadband in India. In response to the call for broadband, the government of India launches a national broadband policy and major players in the market are looking to be at the forefront of the broadband spread.

Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), the biggest state-owned telecom operator in India, holds the license to operate telecom services across the country except Delhi and Mumbai. The existing broadband network of BSNL covers only part of areas in large cities such as Gurgaon, Chennai, Bangalore, Jaipur and Kolkatta, and has extremely low coverage in rural areas as well as small and middle-sized cities. Driven by the increasing demands for broadband services, BSNL has enlarged its investment in the fixed-line broadband project since 2006. 

BSNL’s broadband project is a nationwide IP MAN construction project aiming to improve rural network coverage, increase efficiency of government office automation and speed up national broadband construction. After completion, it will allow broadband users in 800 cities and suburbs of the country to enjoy the high-speed ADSL2+ and VDSL broadband services. 

With the global trend toward IP telecom service, IP technologies featuring good openness and extensibility have been widely applied around the world. The triple play of voice, data and video becomes an inevitable tend. A comment titled “Power to people!” in the March 2008 issue of VOICE & DATA, a famous communications magazine serving India, stated: “Internet and communication technologies have brought about unprecedented changes in the way people communicate and conduct businesses, and broadband is the key contributor toward this change”. It is widely believed that societies that adopt, adapt, and absorb the benefits of broadband enabled information and communication technologies (ICT) services and applications quickly and deeply, will achieve enormous benefits in terms of productivity, innovation, growth, and quality of life. Therefore, the broadband project of BSNL is of great significance in giving Indian people unimaginable power to access, organize, and transform information and in boosting economic development of the country. 

ZTE was selected by BSNL to construct the broadband project due to its proven expertise in broadband network construction. It set up a professional team devoted to the early project preparation, bidding procedures, technical presentation and clarification, engineering survey and implementation, etc. After half a year’s hard work, ZTE has built an advanced broadband network for BSNL. So far, the network has been put into smooth operation, delivering services to more than 2 million broadband users in India.

ZXR10 T64G, a high-end switching router supplied by ZTE, adopts the crossbar hardware architecture capable of providing large-capacity L2/L3/L4 wire-speed and high-bandwidth non-blocking forwarding capabilities. Its hardware-based QoS can guarantee deployment of varieties of value-added services. In compliance with the global Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) standard, ZXR10 T64G offers carrier-class reliability. Additionally, its VLAN and QinQ features provide broadband users with high QoS guarantee for both user and service isolation, thus offering different QoS for different services and allowing users to have quality service experience. Due to its outstanding performance-cost ratio, the ZXR10 T64G high-end switching router stood out among other products supplied by multiple vendors all over the world in the BSNL broadband project, and received high praise from the Bid Evaluation Group. Finally ZTE was awarded the contract to supply 2200 ZXR10 T64G routers that cover 800 large, middle and small-sized cities such as Bhopal, Gwalior, Panjim, udhiana, Chandigarh and Indore, and also cover vast rural areas.

After the initial project was completed, BSNL put the network into commercial use. As the network allows BSNL to deliver low-cost and high-speed broadband access services to users, the number of broadband users grows at an explosive pace, greatly enhancing profitability of India’s broadband network market. With continual service development, ZTE, as a cooperative partner of BSNL, is ready to satisfy the customer’s requirements, managing to extend broadband coverage to more cities. In the capacity expansion project, the ZXR10 T64G high-end switching routers are being deployed in most cities of 23 states of India including Punjab, Karnataka, UP–East, Andhra Pradesh and in the biggest suburb broadband network. Accordingly, ZTE has become the top vendor of LAN SWITCH in the BSNL broadband network project.