du and Huawei Co-debut First Commercial 400G OTN Network in the Middle East & Africa

To enable du to offer higher speeds, better performance and meet demand for high-bandwidth services

Dubai, UAE, 1 October 2015: The Middle East region’s fastest growing telecommunications service provider du and Huawei have announced the successful deployment of their joint 400G OTN network. This is the first of its kind deployment to be launched commercially in the Middle East & Africa region.

du has experienced rapid development in recent years and the growth of its data center and mobile video services now challenge its OTN transport network. du has responded by cooperating with Huawei to deploy a 400G OTN network that will manage the massive amounts of data at its core data center in Khazna.

This new network has the capabilities to bear ultra-broadband requirements for du to expand its service development and transmission capabilities for numerous data center and mobile video services, as well as enhance the end user experience with high-speed video competence. In addition, the 400G OTN network will manage du's transformation on data center requirements for the next three to five years and cement du's status as the data traffic hub of the Middle East.

The introduction of 400G ultrahigh capacity coherent optical transmission into du’s backbone network gives it the opportunity to take optical networks to the next level of capacity, performance and speed. This supports the operator in meeting future broadband network demands and improves speed, capacity, density, efficiency and reach over the optical networks. It will also benefit du as a service provider with several advantages, including higher capacity, scalability, faster time to market and lower cost per bit.

du customers will experience higher speeds and performance. In addition, du will have a longer reach and improved performance to expand and upgrade its core networks and subsequently meet the growing demand for high-bandwidth services of mobile video, for example. On the other hand, it will also be able to take advantage of new opportunities, such as storage area networks, cloud computing and data center interconnection.

Jasim Al Awadi, Vice President, Network Infrastructure and Services, du, commented on this cooperation: "The increasing traffic from mobile broadband and video services greatly impacts our bearer networks. This joint effort with Huawei will maximise du’s network capacity and improve our investment efficiency to meet the service bearing requirements between data centers. This milestone signifies our entrance into the 400G era."

Huawei's exclusive 400G OTN network employs leading oDSP and dual-carrier 16QAM coding technologies, maximising the transmission capacity over fibers. The platform uses OptiX OSN 9800 devices, which feature industry-leading 25.6 Tbit/s cross-connect capacity and 400 Gbit/s per-slot capacity, and support future upgrade to 1T/2T capacity per slot. In addition, the OptiX OSN 9800 is based on open SDN architecture and supports evolution to T-SDN. This innovative design increases flexible service scheduling over du bearer networks, simplifies network O&M, and accelerates service to market.