Page 16 - SAMENA Trends - March-April 2025

REGIONAL & MEMBERS UPDATES SAMENA TRENDS

AT&T Breaks Speed Barriers on Long-Distance Fiber Network

AT&T has achieved a significant technology milestone and use streaming services.” The trial took place over a 296-km
demonstrating its nationwide software-centric network is ready for route spanning Newark, New Jersey to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
massive bandwidth demands driven by AI, user generated content, on AT&T’s existing long-haul fiber network. The single-carrier 1.6
augmented and virtual reality, cloud computing, streaming video Tb/s wavelength was transported alongside existing live customer
and more. Recently, AT&T successfully completed testing a 1.6 traffic on 100Gb/s and 400Gb/s wavelengths. Open-sourced
terabit-per-second single-carrier wavelength across 296 kilometers white box switches acted as network equipment during the trial.
of its commercial long-distance network — four times the speed of The white boxes are designed using the Broadcom Jericho3
current 400Gb/s wavelengths. The 1.6Tb/s wavelength carried two packet processor chip and can provide up to 18 x 800G network
IEEE standards-based 800 Gigabit Ethernet1 end-to-end circuits, interface ports all within a 2RU platform. The DriveNets Network
an industry first. It is a full, uninterrupted data path utilizing a Cloud software-based solution is hardware-agnostic and runs
single light frequency across the entire fiber length between two open APIs on the white boxes to perform data and control plane
points. This trial demonstrates AT&T’s intent to lead the industry functions, including routing at 800G. The use of white boxes and
in providing next-generation speeds – enabling our customers to the disaggregation of the hardware and software control costs and
fully leverage AI and helping them transform how they do business. facilitate faster innovation. The two 800GbE signals from the white
“Traffic on AT&T’s network continues to increase as consumers are box were multiplexed to 1.6 Tb/s in Ciena’s WaveLogic 6 Extreme
using more connected devices,” said Mike Satterlee, vice president, coherent optical transponder, which is the first coherent optical
Network Infrastructure and Services, AT&T. “We anticipate network solution to use a 200Gbaud design and 3nm coherent DSP ASIC
traffic growth to double by 2028 and the technologies demonstrated and to reach speeds up to 1.6 Tb/s on a single carrier. The WL6e
in this trial will play a key role in AT&T’s continued efforts to keep technology reduces the space and power per transmitted bit by
up with increasing customer demand to send data, watch videos, 50% compared to current 800G transponders. This trial is the first
to demonstrate WL6e at 1.6Tb/s with standards compliant 800GbE
clients. In the Newark and Philadelphia offices, 800G DR8 pluggable
transceivers from Coherent were installed in the white box router
and WL6e transponder to create the cross-office connectivity
between the packet and optical technologies. And 800GbE client
signals, provided by Keysight’s AresOne-M 800GE testset, fed
the white box through additional pairs of 800G DR8 pluggable
client optics, allowing verification of end-to-end performance
of the two 800GbE services from Newark to Philadelphia. “This
groundbreaking achievement with AT&T adds to a growing list of
Ciena industry-firsts that push the boundaries of optical network
speed and capacity,” said Dino DiPerna, senior vice president,
Global Research and Development, Ciena. “Ciena’s WaveLogic 6
coherent optics will support AT&T’s next gen converged optical
network and efforts to build a cloud-based and AI-ready network
with greater scale, flexibility and efficiency.”

China Mobile Targets 2.8M 5G Sites Despite
Capex Cut

China Mobile laid out plans to add 340,000 5G base stations in 2025 chair Yang Jie noted “amid a complex and stressful external envi-
despite intending to trim overall capex for the full year, with spend- ronment marked by various challenges”, the company united as a
ing on the generation of infrastructure to decline 15.6 per cent year- team to record a favourable operating performance. Net profit in
on-year. With the additional sites, its 5G base station count will hit 2024 rose 5 per cent to CNY138.4 billion, with operating revenue
2.8 million by the end of the year. In its annual results statement, up 3.1 per cent to CNY1 trillion. Service revenue increased 3 per
the operator forecast capex for 2025 would drop 7.8 per cent. This cent to CNY889.5 billion, while product sales improved 3.8 per cent
follows a 7.6 per cent drop in 2024 to CNY164 billion ($22 billion), to CNY151.3 billion. China Mobile now breaks down revenue into
lower than its original CNY173 billion forecast. The operator’s total four categories: mobile, home broadband and smart home, enter-
mobile user base topped 1 billion at end-2024, up from 991 mil- prise and new businesses. Mobile revenue dipped 1.3 per cent to
lion a year earlier. Its number of 5G network customers grew 18.7 CNY483.7 billion; broadband grew 8.5 per cent to CNY106.8 billion;
per cent to 552 million. ARPU slipped 1.6 per cent to CNY49.30, enterprise was up 8.8 per cent to CNY209.1 billion; and new market
average monthly data usage was steady at 15.9GB. China Mobile 8.7 per cent to CNY53.6 billion.
16 MARCH-APRIL 2025