Capacity of main communication lines to be increased in Azerbaijan

Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 8

By Huseyn Valiyev - Trend:

Capacity of main lines of Azerbaijan’s state telecommunications operator Aztelekom LLC will be increased to 400 Gbps, the company told Trend.

This is included in the company’s plans for future.

"We are planning to deploy a Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) network with capacity of 20 Gbps," said the company. "We are introducing broadband internet services based on gigabit passive optical network (GPON), and in the future we plan to deploy xGPON technology and develop DWDM MPLS networks on mine lines with capacity of up to 400 Gbps."

The company noted that one of the development prospects also includes abandoning traditional methods of traffic control in MPLS networks, that is, a transition from traffic engineering to software-defined networking (SDN) technology, which will ensure providing the widest range of services to end users.

"We have users living in hard-to-reach places and remote locations," said the company. "These are mostly rural and mountainous areas, where it is very difficult to lay cable lines. In the past, it was thought that the development of 4G and 5G networks was the prerogative of mobile operators. Recently, however, fixed LTE is being introduced by broadband access providers. Aztelekom LLC has also begun to introduce this technology."

The network was tested in Azerbaijan’s Khachmaz district, the company noted, adding that the introduction of fixed LTE allowed the company to provide high internet access speeds (up to 100 Mbps) in hard-to-reach places.

"We transmit the last mile via radio-relay communication, thus we don’t have to lay a fiber optic network to the end point," the company said. "Many vendors believe that it is necessary to provide traffic up to one gigabit with minimum delay to LTE base station, especially the three-sector one. In reality is not so. That is, in reality, averaged data shows that this is not necessary. It will be possible with 5G connections, when there will be active use of Carrier Aggregation and Dual Carrier Aggregation technologies. It is possible that today 1 gigabit of traffic to the station is needed in large cities with high population density, for example, in cities of Japan or China."

The equipment when building the LTE network was purchased not from the leading vendors, which made it possible to save a lot of money, the company noted.

"Today, many second-tier vendors have appeared, they produce fairly quality LTE equipment," the company added. "Many vendors of modified Wi-Fi appear. This is not a traditional Wi-Fi operating at 5Ghz."

When building and expanding the LTE network, the experience of the Georgian company SilkNet will be used, the Aztelekom company said.

SilkNet has been introducing LTE in rural and in hard-to-reach areas for several years, the company noted.

"The Georgian company initially installs LTE, and then, when the number of households increases, the number of users grows and the expediency of laying optic fiber lines appears, LTE equipment is dismantled and transferred to more distant places," the company said. "That is, in fact, we plan to use similar methods. We build LTE on higher frequencies (2.3 MHz). However, we have a fairly wide range of 58 MHz. We are working on getting additional 2 MHz and on the organization of three channels."

One of the promising areas also includes the virtualization and placing the actually traditional LTE core in a "cloud", the company noted.

"Together with our partners, we have already completely virtualized the APC packet core, placing it in the "cloud"," the company said. "This solution makes it possible to save both on the resources themselves and on the administration of their data."