Building fiber optic networks in China for multimedia applications

This paper reviews Lucent Technologies' effort to build the state-of-the-art fiber-optic transport networks in China. As the world fastest growing economy for the last decade, China's demand for telecommunication grows exponentially. Fiber-optic based transport networks as information superhighway is crucial for this telecommunication revolution in China. The first wave of transport network transformation came in 1993 when synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH) was introduced in China. Lucent Technologies has been at the forefront of this effort for the last five years. The second wave of transformation came in 1997 when China's first dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) technologies in national backbone networks. This year, Lucent Technologies, selected by China Telecom, is going to massively deploy DWDM technologies in national backbone networks. This effort will increase the transport capacity by an order of magnitude. The effort to increase transport bandwidth is accompanied by the effort to introduce new applications on fiber-optic networks. In December 1997, SDH based fiber-optic networks are now used for multimedia services.