Huawei Helps China Unicom Beijing Achieve a 40-fold Growth of OTN Private Line Services

Two years ago, private lines faced intense competition and suffered to live up to more demanding requirements, such as deterministic low latency, flexible self-service speed adjustment (bandwidth on demand, BoD), and self-management and service. For this reason, differentiated premium private lines are needed for operators to stand out in the competition.

 

China Unicom Beijing (Beijing Unicom) launched SmartLink private lines in November 2018, which is the world’s first premium private line product with packet enhanced OTN (PeOTN) and iMaster NCE support. It provides differentiated private line services that are secure, self-manageable, agile, rapid, and transparent for users all around China.

 

Over the past two years, more than 6,500 SmartLink private line services have been provisioned (a 40-fold increase) in a number of industries, such as finance, Internet, public services, and research. Currently, a SmartLink private line user accesses the self-service portal on an average of 1.5 times a month, and can query parameters such as bandwidth, latency, availability, and health status. The self-service portal has seen a 61-fold increase in monthly use of all users compared with two years ago. Meanwhile, usage of the self-service query function has also made value-added services such as online BoD more popular. In September 2020, Beijing Unicom effectively handled 352 online speed acceleration requests, which is over 100 times more than two years ago. The new monthly payment model has seen BoD generate more than CNY300,000 in revenue for Beijing Unicom in September.

 

SmartLink private lines have been instrumental throughout the pandemic, guaranteeing the transmission of pandemic-related data for China’s National Health Commission. In February, China launched health code programs through various apps to combat the spread of the virus. These health codes assign different colors based on a person’s medical and travel history. The data used to generate these codes is aggregated to the National Health Commission’s pandemic- data analysis platform through private lines.

A SmartLink private line is a hard pipe that is secure and isolated. To further enhance security, OTN devices are configured with encryption boards to ensure safe transmission of epidemic data and safeguard users’ privacy.