China Mobile chooses Juniper Networks for smartphone revolution

The Chinese service provider implements Juniper’s new network solution for its IP/MPLS backbone.

Juniper Networks on Friday announced that China Mobile Limited has gone live with a next-generation IP/MPLS backbone network comprised of routers running the Junos® operating system. Implementation of Juniper Networks® TX Matrix Plus multi-chassis routing systems, T1600 Core Routers and M320 Multiservice Edge Routers enables China Mobile to capitalize on smartphone growth while laying a solid foundation to deliver higher bandwidth rich media applications.

With nearly 584 million customers, China Mobile is the world's largest mobile network operator while China TieTong, its fixed network subsidiary, also has a growing number of broadband customers. In 2010, China Mobile added 58 million subscribers to its customer base and an increasing number of them are using smartphones and opting for its TD-SCDMA 3G service, driving the need to scale CMNET, its IP network.

“This is obviously a very significant win by any measure and there was keen competition for the contract,” said Mike Marcellin, vice president of product marketing, and strategy at Juniper Networks. “In order to maintain its position at the top of the mobile service provider market, China Mobile recognized the need to implement a new mobile network in order to provide outstanding reliability and performance while lowering their total cost of ownership. Juniper’s ability to deliver and support advanced MPLS technologies was a key factor in China Mobile’s decision and as mobile data usage rapidly expands they will be well positioned to monetize the smartphone revolution.”

Juniper Networks’ new mobile network solution employs T1600 Core Routers configured in TX Matrix Plus clusters at CMNET's primary core nodes and T1600 and M320 routers at secondary core nodes. These support dozens of backbone access nodes equipped with Juniper Networks M Series routers across the country. The result is a highly stable, available and scalable high-speed network with strong QoS management capabilities.

To meet China Mobile's quality of service goals Juniper incorporates a number of key technologies to create a superior non-stop routing environment. These include support for very large forwarding tables, MPLS and Fast Reroute and the peerless ability of Junos operating system to handle in-service software upgrades, according to a Juniper Networks report.

The Juniper Networks TX Matrix Plus is a central switching and routing element that interconnects T1600 chassis over non-blocking optical interfaces and a center-stage fabric to create a single routing entity that scales gracefully as more ports are added. Capable of accommodating 8 line cards, each T1600 delivers up to 1.6 Tbps of capacity (100 Gbps/slot) with the ability to forward up to 1.92 billion pps. The Juniper Networks M320 Multiservice Edge Router is a high-performance, 10 Gbps-capable device with a distributed architecture that delivers up to 320 Gbps of throughput.