China Telecom Group announced recently that it has selected Cisco Systems as the major equipment provider for expansion of the northern and southern backbone networks of ChinaNet, China Telecom's broadband Internet.

After the expansion, the ChinaNet backbone northern network will provide more bandwidth and thus support more applications to its customers on a more reliable and scalable Internet Protocol (IP) multiservice platform, and the southern network will offer a 10-gigabits-per-second (10-Gbps) link connecting 21 southern provinces and helping to ensure stronger competitiveness and higher-quality service in the marketplace.

As China's largest public network and boasting the greatest number of Internet subscribers, ChinaNet faces increasing pressure on its limited bandwidth while China's Internet users and information-technology (IT) applications are growing rapidly. Broadband users and new applications, particularly real-time IP services, are driving the growth of ChinaNet. For its northern network, which covers 15 cities in 10 provinces, including Beijing, ChinaNet has selected Cisco 12016 and Cisco 12416 routers for its second-phase expansion. The Cisco 12000 Series represents the industry's most intelligent portfolio of 10G routing solutions to service-enable the carrier IP/MPLS core and edge networks. This portfolio of platforms leads the market with uncompromising 10 Gigabit routing performance, superior QoS and Multicast capabilities, integrated core and edge service-enablers, and comprehensive IPv4 and IPv6 support. Successful cooperation for the second-phase expansion of the northern network is part of a long-term relationship between Cisco and China Telecom, which began with the first-phase project.

The present upgrade of the ChinaNet backbone southern network is the fifth collaboration between Cisco and ChinaNet. They previously collaborated on the four stages of the network's construction and expansion. Cisco technology will be applied to update the switching matrix of Cisco 12000 Series routers previously deployed, and combined with 10-Gbps router line cards, will enable the network to migrate from 80-Gbps switching capacity of the Cisco 12000 Series routers to 320-Gbps capacity of the Cisco 12400 routers. With the additional capacity, the network will allow 10-Gbps data transmission between core nodes and a flexible expansion at the aggregation nodes interconnected to core nodes to meet the amount of service volume.