Microchip Enables China to Deploy World’s First Bandwidth-on-Demand Services Powered by Optical Transport Network (OTN)

Carriers in China have been aggressively deploying 100G-capable OTN switching networks over the last few years, and now its largest carrier is poised to launch a new network to support government/enterprise leased-line services that will leverage the international standard for dynamically adjusting OTN connection bandwidth.  As the only commercial silicon and software supplier supporting the Hitless Adjustment of ODUflex (HAO) specifications, Microchip Technology Inc. (Nasdaq: MCHP), via its Microsemi subsidiary, provided a benchmark solution based on its DIGI OTN processor family that was key in enabling China Mobile to complete multi-vendor interoperability tests. China Mobile is now able to launch the world’s first bandwidth-on-demand leased-line services offering, providing government and enterprise customers the flexibility to adjust their required network bandwidth in real-time as workloads continue to move to the cloud.

Microchip’s DIGI family of OTN processors enables carriers to extend OTN from their metro networks to the access layer for use in delivering leased-line and other high-availability and bandwidth-guaranteed services to government, enterprise and data center customers. Each generation of DIGI OTN processors has also integrated HAO functionality so that carriers can provide customers the bandwidth they need when they need it. Without HAO, the bandwidth of the end-to-end connections for delivering these services is fixed, and to change the bandwidth, the connections must be torn down, causing traffic disruption. China Mobile used the DIGI OTN processors to verify technology and software readiness to support roll out bandwidth-on-demand services at scale with the support of multiple system vendors whose OTN equipment demonstrated interoperability.

“China Mobile has deployed bandwidth-on-demand capabilities in our new Government/Enterprise OTN network to benefit from all the advantages of flexible bandwidth and services,” said Yunbo Li, project manager at China Mobile Research Institute. “We are the world’s first carrier to specify HAO product interoperability requirements and test specifications and now, working with Microchip and our ecosystem of equipment providers, we are pleased to have completed a major step toward large-scale deploying this technology and paving the way for it to become part of our new production network operations.”