CRC trials NGN in Chongqing - Advertisement - China Railcom

Telecommunications International, August, 2002

China Railcom (CRC) is a comparative newcomer to the Chinese telecoms market. The company uses the fibre backbone of China's enormous railway network, but is still tiny in comparison to the more established players. Founded at the end of 2000, CRC posted revenues of US$450 million in 2001, compared to China Telecom's sales of US$22 billion. So, how does CRC plan to win a larger slice of China's telecoms cake in future?

Part of the answer can be found in the western Chinese city of Chongqing, famous for its stunning location (it is built on two sides of steep valley at the confluence of the Yangtze and the Jialing rivers), and often called 'Mountain City'. Here, behind a row of shops on a busy city centre street is an anonymous looking courtyard with an ageing five-storey building at the back. It hardly looks high-tech, but inside the building CRC is running a commercial trial of next generation network (NGN) technology.

CRC believes that future competition will centre on the provision of advanced services, and the company is determined to become a leading provider and host of these services. CRC has chosen to use NGN technology from Huawei Technologies in its commercial trial. The concept behind NGNs is simple enough: to separate the intelligence of switches from the switches themselves. This delivers flexibility, extremely high performance, and scalability to operators, who don't have to spend enormous sums on major switch upgrades every time they want to introduce new services. NGNs also allow broadband, narrowband and IP services to coexist on the same network, giving operators the chance to develop an exciting portfolio of offerings.

At China Railcom, the technical team is putting Huawei's solution through its paces. Huawei has used a popular architecture for the design of its system. At the heart of the NGN is the soft switch (called SoftX). Around this are a trunk media gateway (TMG8010), access media gateways (AMG5000 series), intelligent terminals (Ephone/IAD/PC phone), a network management system (iOSS) and an IP broadband intelligent service platform (Tellin).

Huawei's NGN solution supports a wide range of intelligent IP services, such as IP centrex, IP Hotel, universal messaging and click-to-dial (where users click on an Internet hyperlink and immediately get connected by phone to the organisation in question). The TMG8010 has strong multi-protocol capability, and Huawei's integrated management system covers the access, core, control and service layers in one package, thereby reducing maintenance costs and improving efficiency.

CRC is using Huawei's NGN solution to assess user demand and acceptance for a number of services. As for services, unified messaging is high on the priority list, but further down the line a host of broadband services, many from third parties, are likely to follow.

"The real attractions of NGNs are the huge range of services they can provide and the speed and low cost of doing so," says Huang Xiao, chief engineer in Huawei's switch and AN marketing department. "For a new and comparatively small operator like China Railcom, that flexibility in being able to differentiate itself is important. That's why we're helping them with the trial in Chongqing. We are at the edge of a new era in telecoms, with operators being able to experiment much more freely with services in order to see what customers really need."

Indeed, CRC is not the only operator to be trialling Huawei's NGN offering. China Unicom, China Satellite Communication, and Hong Kong's Hutchison Telecom also have trials underway. "We're very excited by the future of NGNs," says Huang. "We think they have enormous potential."