China Unicom announced the list of 4 successful bidders for the centralized procurement of smart metro equipment in 2022. Among them, Huawei won first place with a quotation of 3.297 billion yuan, and the quotations of ZTE, Fiberhome, and H3C were 3.176 billion, 3.067 billion, and 2.721 billion respectively.
The bid opening for this centralized procurement is the "2022 China Unicom Smart Metro Equipment Centralized Procurement Announcement" issued by China Unicom on September 8, 2022. The bidding agency is Guosen Tendering Group Co., Ltd. According to the procurement company, the centralized procurement plans to purchase 84,929 sets of intelligent metropolitan area network equipment and the expansion needs of the existing network. The project is not divided into bid packages, and the number of successful bidders is at most 4.
This centralized procurement should be the first target of the three major operators' 5G bearer networks in 2022.
The last round of China Unicom's smart metro equipment centralized procurement was in 2020, and four companies, namely Huawei, ZTE, Fiberhome, and H3C, also won the bid. According to the winning bid results at that time, Huawei's bid share is estimated to be more than 52%, ZTE's share is estimated to be more than 25%, and the rest is divided by Fiberhome and Xinhua.
Unicom's smart metropolitan area network has obvious advantages
The so-called smart metropolitan area network refers to the smart metropolitan area network with the communication cloud DC as the core and using SR+EVPN technology, that is, China Unicom's 5G bearer network.
The previous metro network architecture faced many challenges when carrying 5G large bandwidth, cloudification, cloud-network integration, and SDN services, such as high cost, complex service orchestration, and difficulty in implementing cloud-network integration. In order to solve the above challenges, China Unicom proposed a new metropolitan area network architecture of fixed-mobile integration, cloud-network integration, and physical + virtual for the 5G era.
The new MAN architecture breaks the independent chimney network architecture and builds a converged bearer network platform. Among them, the new smart metropolitan area network takes the operator data center (DC) as the core module. By introducing the metropolitan fabric, multiple DCs are built into a comprehensive service carrying a super data center with a three-level spine/leaf (leaf-spine network) architecture.
The new-generation network architecture of Spine-Leaf is built through innovation, extending from the large second-layer to the third-layer service network, and applied to the metropolitan area network architecture, breaking the traditional professional boundary, supporting lightweight protocols, and supporting elastic and rapid expansion. The new architecture has an average network level Reduced by 45%, greatly reducing network construction and operating costs. Integrate new technologies such as SR/slicing/clocking on new devices, define key technologies for the converged bearer, integrate capability models, and improve SR protocol deployment to achieve a full-service converged bearer. It is the industry's first SR/EVPN commercial carrier 5G bearer network , to support the separation of the network industry. The end-to-end SDN system deployment of cross-domain, cross-manufacturer, cross-switching/routing equipment is realized, service is provisioned rapidly and flexibly, and the provisioning time is reduced from days to minutes. The SDN control system is deployed in cities across the country to achieve the world's largest nationwide centralized management and control. The project has formed an IETF international standard proposal and a number of patents. The key equipment technologies adopted are fully self-developed to ensure national network security, solve the problem of bottlenecks in key areas, and promote the end-to-end autonomous and controllable capacity building of chips, protocols, equipment, and platforms.
In general, the design idea of the new architecture is to build a new smart city at the metro level that integrates and carries 5G services with "simplified network structure, simplified network protocol, simplified network equipment, and intelligent network control and network management". domain network.
In the article "Discussion and Practice of China Unicom's Smart Metropolitan Area Network Architecture", the author mentioned that the field test of China Unicom's Smart Metropolitan Area Network has shown many advantages:
- The new smart metropolitan area network architecture can well realize the integration of 5G, government and enterprise, and home broadband services.
- The new metropolitan area network has the advantages of large capacity and advanced architecture.
- The new MAN can save a lot of rack space and reduce power consumption through a converged bearer.
- The new metropolitan area network can provide a better-integrated carrying capacity for cloud services.
- The introduction of the controller greatly speeds up the service provisioning speed and realizes the deployment of SDN differentiated services through the controller.
China Unicom's Smart Metropolitan Area Network Advancement Achieves Preliminary Results
China Unicom started the research and design of new smart metropolitan area network technology in 2017 and completed the pilot of the existing network and commercial verification in some cities in 2018-2019.
In 2019, in order to verify the bearing effect of the new smart metropolitan area network on the existing network services, China Unicom Headquarters, together with 6 network manufacturers including Cisco, Huawei, H3C, and ZTE, established 10 companies in Guangdong, Beijing, Shandong, Jiangsu, Chongqing, and other provinces. The field pilot project of the smart metropolitan area network has been carried out, which has verified the feasibility of the smart metropolitan area network for 5G, home broadband, and government and enterprise services.
At the time, Cisco was also an important part of the pilot project. Today, domestic manufacturers have become the absolute main force.
Today, China Unicom's smart metropolitan area network project has taken the lead in realizing the large-scale commercial deployment of SR/SRv6 full-service carrying, network-wide SDN management, and control, covering 330 local networks nationwide. And the core technical indicators of new equipment are in the international leading position. In March 2022, the "Key Technologies and Applications of Smart Metropolitan Area Network" project led by China Unicom won the first prize of the 2021 China Communications Society Science and Technology Award.
"At present, the smart metropolitan area network has accumulated more than 400,000 5G base stations and 160 million 5G users' bearer needs, supporting a number of innovative businesses of China Unicom Group." Li Tong, deputy general manager of China Unicom Group's Smart Network Innovation Center, said in May this year was revealed in an interview with the media.
In addition to the overall deployment at the China Unicom Group level, in recent years, China Unicom's local branches have also actively promoted the construction and implementation of smart metropolitan area networks.
For example, on April 29, 2020, Chongqing Unicom and Huawei opened the country's first 5G commercial site for a smart metropolitan area network. The network carrying capacity of the smart metropolitan area network has increased by 10 times compared with the original carrying network, and the unit bandwidth cost has been reduced by 75%. Co-construction and sharing with Chongqing Telecom.
Starting from 2020, Hebei Unicom has invested more than 400 million yuan, and more than 150 experts and technicians have carried out the transformation of the intelligent metropolitan area network to build a new generation of digital information infrastructure. A few days ago, Hebei Unicom Cloud Network Operation Center successfully opened the country's first cloud networking cross-domain circuit for smart metropolitan area network access.
Beijing Unicom selected a smart metropolitan area network for autonomous driving innovation. About hundreds of thousands of pieces of operation and maintenance data are generated on the 5G bearer network of Beijing Unicom every day. Through the use of AI correlation analysis in the network management and control system, the embedded AI identifies abnormal network indicators, uses millions of network indicators to collect, and 10,000-level CPUs are distributed and parallelized. Computing, collecting network data in seconds, and reporting in minutes. At present, Beijing Unicom has fully covered AI in smart metropolitan area network (5G bearer network) equipment, eliminating possible hidden dangers and significantly improving network quality.
With the end of Unicom's centralized procurement of smart metro equipment, it is expected that China Telecom and China Mobile will also have further actions .
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