Chinese Providers Opt For Cisco Networking Strategy

US firm Cisco Systems, Inc. is providing Internetworking solutions to four prominent service providers in China.

“Service providers in China clearly recognize the advantages of optical Internetworking,” said Graeme Fraser, general manager of Cisco’s Optical Internetworking Business Unit. “These providers are building networks that will ensure China’s significant role in the Internet economy.”

According to Cisco representatives, Shanghai Online, Dalian CATV, Guangdong CATV and China Telecom are deploying the Cisco 12000 Gigabit Switch Router (GSR) series and are among the first in the world to utilize optical Internetworking.

China’s national telecommunications carrier, China Telecom, has produced a network backbone centered around six GSR’s for the country’s largest Internet access provider, ChinaNet, which covers 30 cities.

With Cisco 12008 GSR’s, Guangdong CATV is building a backbone network that will provide H.729 audio, MPEG2 video and LAN data traffic over one an IP platform to more than 400,000 subscribers in Guangdong Province.

“We have ambitious plans to offer a variety of multimedia value-added service to our cable TV subscribers, so we demand tremendous new functionality and higher performance from our networking equipment,” said Wang Chang Li, president of Guangdong CATV, one of China’s largest cable television stations.

“We selected Cisco Systems over its competitors because it was able to demonstrate the level of support and performance needed,” said Wang.

Cisco has also sold routers to Dalian CATV, which is transmitting data, voice and live video over its 16 node network, and to Shanghai Online, which will enable it to roll out a Packet-over-SDH (Synchronous Digital Hierarchy) capability that sends IP packets over SDH equipment.

With the acceleration in Internet development, there is high demand in China for IP-based multi-service networks.

As regional trade and communications hubs, Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou are the cities that have the greatest need for a high bandwidth, reliable infrastructure.