Why OTN Premium Private Lines Are the Best Choice for Operators

In just a few years, the OTN private line solutions have been widely adopted by operators around the world.

With returns from subscriber and traffic growth fading, operators can no longer rely on increasing user numbers to drive revenues. They must pivot to high-quality services for the enterprise market.

There are currently around 42 million enterprises in China, and an additional 13 million or so will be established over the next three years. As digital transformation accelerates, enterprise cloudification will be a highly sought-after service. Gartner predicts that 85% of organizations will be committed to cloudification by 2025, which in turn will ensure the global private line market keeps growing.

OTN Premium Private Lines in China

China’s three tier-1 operators regard the enterprise market as a pillar of business development. In November 2018, China Mobile built the world’s largest OTN premium private line network. In 2019, China Mobile set up its Enterprise Business Department to focus on this market. Also in 2019, China Telecom launched its next-gen OTN premium optical network to achieve cloud-network synergy and thus boost its share in the private line market and increase its competitiveness in the cloud services. China Unicom used its expertise in premium financial networks to establish industry-specific private line services for different industry markets.

Currently, these three tier-1 operators have built nearly 70 OTN premium private line networks, with China Unicom constructing the majority. And this strategy has paid off: In 2020, the number of enterprise private line customers in China reached 13.84 million, a net increase of 3.56 million, which generated revenue reached US$3.75 billion – a year-on-year growth of 19.3%. China Unicom’s revenue from circuit leasing increased by 6%, and China Telecom’s revenue from industry digital transformation reached US$13.13 billion.

OTN Premium Private Lines in Thailand

In December 2019, Thailand CAT released the nation’s first OTN premium private line network, serving medium and large organizations and laying a solid network foundation for Thailand’s 2020 digital transformation.

“As the largest communication and data network service provider in Thailand, CAT is the operator with the largest communications network coverage in Thailand,” said Dr. Dhanant Subhadrabandhu, Senior Executive Vice President (Marketing and Service) for CAT. “The private line network uses E2E OTN physical isolation pipes to ensure security, support flexible access of any services, provide guaranteed E2E stable millisecond-level latency, and prevent multiple fiber cuts. It’s not only enhance the competitiveness of CAT’s B2B services but is also an important driving force for CAT’s business development in 2020.”

After just a year, CAT had attracted high-value orders from big-name customers, including Google.

OTN Premium Private Lines in Brazil

In 2020, Brazil Oi launched its leading private-line brand and completed the third phase of an OTN premium private line project with Huawei to lower transmission costs and raise connection stability. Currently, Brazil Oi is preparing to expand this project by building E2E premium connections over a distance of 3,000 km. OTN premium private lines provide Brazil Oi with high availability, guaranteed data bandwidth, physical network isolation, fast service provisioning, and about 10-ms device latency – the operator attracted many customers, including Sicoob.

Many other operators, such as Vodafone, Indosat, PLDT, Turkcell, and Fastweb, have constructed OTNs and launched OTN premium private line products.

Why OTN Premium Private Lines?

Key industries, such as finance, healthcare, and Internet, require private lines to carry voice, data, image, and video data. The following shows the advantages of the Huawei OTN Premium Private Line solution over traditional private lines:

1. Ultra-high security: OTN is regarded as the most secure line in the industry. It provides physically isolated hard pipes for enterprises to build a “high-speed railway” for data transmission, and dedicated data channels to protect confidential data and stop data leaks. Using other technologies, data from different enterprises can be transmitted on the same channel and logically isolated based on QoS, creating a “multi-lane highway” for traffic on which data can freely switch between lanes, with OTN high-speed lane traffic taking priority.
2. Ultra-high bandwidth: OTN originates from WDM technology. It divides available spectrum in the communications field into 96 channels, with each channel able to carry up to 200 Gbps of traffic. OTN uses cutting-edge optical service unit (OSU) technology to support a minimum bandwidth of 2 Mbps. Thus, OTN can flexibly meet various bandwidth requirements.
3. Ultra-high reliability: Traditional networks only provide ring network protection and a service reliability of 99% to 99.9%. OTN has many possible protection schemes such as 1+1 active/standby protection and automatically switched optical network (ASON), enabling 99.99% reliability. When an optical cable fault occurs due to network construction, services can be quickly switched to the standby path to prevent any impact on production systems.
4. Ultra-low latency: Light is the fastest data transmission medium, traveling faster than 200,000 km per second in optical fibers. An E2E all-optical network greatly reduces optical-electrical-optical conversions and enables one-hop data transmission, so that latency in private lines can be reduced to milliseconds. Exclusive channels based on the OTN “high-speed railway” network prevents data congestion, ensuring near constant latency for enterprise private lines. Networks using other technologies are prone to traffic jams, and their latency is unstable.
5. High flexibility: In the past, it was difficult or time-consuming for enterprises to accelerate private lines. The intelligent management and control system iMaster NCE can perform unified management on OTN premium private lines. When enterprises purchase a bandwidth acceleration package, their private lines can be quickly accelerated to meet various urgent bandwidth requirements.
6. Self-service management: OTN uses an intelligent management and control system for centralized management and to fully automate service processes, and network management systems can be provided for VIP customers. Customers can view the performance data of private lines in real time, including basic information, bandwidth, traffic, and latency.

As growth in the retail customer market slows down, the enterprise market has become a field that vendors want to conquer, including Internet companies. Operators should therefore go for high quality, with OTN premium private lines that are ultra-secure and reliable and provide ultra-high bandwidth, ultra-low latency, high flexibility, and self-service management.

Learn more about the Huawei OTN Premium Private Line product range.

Disclaimer: Any views and/or opinions expressed in this post by individual authors or contributors are their personal views and/or opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views and/or opinions of Huawei Technologies.