ZTE and China Mobile Propel SPN/MTN Evolution with ITU-T's Release of Fine Grain International Standards

ZTE Corporation, in collaboration with China Mobile and industry partners, has proposed new international standards for the Slicing Packet Network (SPN)/Metro Transport Networks (MTN) series. The recently released at the ITU-T SG15 plenary meeting 2023 in Geneva, these standards focus on fine grain slicing of the SPN: G.8312.20 (fgMTN overview), G.8312 Amendment 2 and G.8310 Amendment 1.

At the same time, two new fine grain MTN standards have been approved: G.8321 Amendment 1 and G.8312 Amendment 3, which is about bandwidth hitless adjustment and CBR service. This release enriches the SPN/MTN series standards, indicating their powerful evolution capability, demonstrating their vigorous vitality and laying a solid foundation for the large-scale commercial use of SPN technology worldwide in the future.

It was China Mobile that proposed this new generation of SPN/MTN technology for 5G transport. Since 2018, the six core standards of architecture, interfaces, equipment, protection, management and control and evolution have been gradually approved and released. At the stage of SPN2.0, the operator and its partners like ZTE constantly enrich the technical connotation of this system. Based on its advantages such as low latency, large bandwidth, ultra-high-precision synchronization and flexible management and control, the system introduces the 10M fine grain and hard-isolation slicing to provide service quality as good as those provided by SDH for integrated service transport, effectively expand the SPN transport capability and build a technical benchmark for transmitting integrated services such as vertical industries and enterprise private lines.

In the realm of technology industrialization, ZTE takes proactive measures to advance the verification of cutting-edge technologies of SPN fine grain slicing and explores novel service applications. For example, ZTE was the first to build FlexE-based Nx10M fine grain prototype, and proudly of being the inaugural vendor to successfully complete the laboratory test, pilot in existing network and achieve commercial deployment.

Furthermore, the G.8312 Amendment 2 released this time and G.8312 Amendment 3 approved in this meeting serve as the cornerstone of the SPN/MTN fine grain standard series. Notably, they are collaboratively edited by China Mobile and ZTE. Over the years, China Mobile has played a pivotal role as the editor of seven standards within the SPN/MTN series, while ZTE has contributed as the editor of five. Both China Mobile and ZTE have made significant and indispensable contributions to the standardization of key SPN/MTN technologies.

Moving forward, ZTE is committed to sustained collaboration with China Mobile, focusing on technological innovations and advancing SPN development. This partnership aims to deliver high-quality transport solutions tailored for the new stage of 5G.

The ITU's Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) is a UN subordinate organization of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), which is responsible for information communication technology standards. The SG15 is a study group that researches the technical standards of optical transport networks and access networks, and has released multiple widely used transport network technology standards such as SDH, OTN and MTN.