The Enterprise OTN network is China Telecom’s premium nationwide bearer network designed for high-quality enterprise leased lines. It supports business users with reliable, low-latency, and high-bandwidth connectivity. Although its structure is extensive, it mainly contains three layers: the backbone network, the metropolitan area network (MAN), and the OTN-CPE access terminals. Together, they create an end-to-end transmission system that ensures stable performance for enterprise applications.
Major Procurement Milestones
Over the past few years, China Telecom has continued to expand the Enterprise OTN network through large-scale centralized procurement. These efforts aim to strengthen backbone capacity, improve MAN coverage, and enhance user-side access.
First, on November 9, 2023, China Telecom released the “Single-Source Procurement Announcement for the Enterprise OTN (2023) Centralized Procurement Project.” This phase focused on the backbone and CPE portions. The selected vendors were Huawei, ZTE, and FiberHome. Because these companies already supply large-volume OTN systems to carriers, the selection ensured cohesive technical standards across the national network.
Next, on June 14, 2024, the operator issued another single-source procurement announcement for the MAN portion. Once again, Huawei, ZTE, and FiberHome won the bids. This step strengthened urban-level OTN coverage, and therefore made the entire Enterprise OTN network more consistent from core to edge.
Finally, on September 12, 2024, China Telecom announced the centralized procurement for the international and domestic integrated expansion project, which supports enterprise leased lines that cross national borders. Huawei became the winning bidder, further consolidating the technical foundation for global OTN services.
Early Backbone Construction and Scale
China Telecom first built the backbone portion of its Enterprise OTN network in 2019. The investment reached 1.628 billion yuan and covered a wide range of infrastructure needs. The project deployed 184 backbone OTN nodes across 128 cities, opened 99 additional optical cable nodes, and built metropolitan area networks in 12 key cities and 116 ordinary cities. It also delivered 4,000 OTN-CPE devices, supporting enterprise access at scale. At that time, Huawei served as the sole vendor.
Today, the backbone portion is mainly deployed at 400G, while traditional 100G expansion is gradually declining. As traffic continues to grow, carriers need higher-capacity transmission solutions that can support cloud migration, video applications, and large-scale private line services.
Industry Solutions and Technology Evolution
HTF has designed and customized a wide range of 400G wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) transmission solutions for domestic and international customers. These solutions reduce deployment costs, enhance network flexibility, and support future data-intensive applications. A typical configuration is 40 × 400G, delivering 16 Tbps of ultra-high transmission capacity. Because this architecture scales efficiently, it helps enterprises and operators adapt quickly as data demands rise.
Why the Enterprise OTN Network Matters
The Enterprise OTN network is not just a transmission pipeline. Instead, it is a strategic infrastructure designed to give enterprises a stable, secure, and future-ready communication environment. It improves service continuity and ensures high-quality digital connectivity for industries such as finance, government, healthcare, manufacturing, and cloud services. Moreover, its multi-layered architecture allows China Telecom to provide flexible, SLA-based leased lines with predictable performance.
Through ongoing expansion, China Telecom continues to enhance the capacity and reach of the Enterprise OTN network. As a result, enterprise users benefit from faster provisioning, more stable connections, and stronger support for digital transformation.