20 February 2017, Shenzhen, China – ZTE Corporation (0763.HK / 000063.SZ), a major international provider of telecommunications, enterprise and consumer technology solutions for the Mobile Internet, today announced that it was chosen to be the exclusive construction provider of the China Mobile Group Hebei Branch (Hebei Mobile) integrated content delivery network (iCDN) and home service smart operation platform. This was commercially launched in June, 2016 and now has large-scale service capability providing content caching, web services, media services, file download and many types of service distribution. 

The iCDN project was the Mobile Group’s first commercial iCDN to carry Internet protocol television (IPTV), over-the-top content (OTT) and Cache. The smart operation platform guarantees unified operation and service capability expansion.

iCDN, building a premium content network

ZTE designed the Hebei Mobile iCDN as part of its transformation strategy from network coverage to content coverage. The project was completed quickly and contained software/hardware deployment, security, compliance, ability for outside integration (such as video, provincial broadcasting, licensing and data network management (NM)) of the service online test and NM monitoring.

Hebei Mobile focused on new service innovations such as 4K ultra high definition (UHD), virtual reality (VR), TV everywhere and new requirements for content distribution network (CDN) architecture guided by network functions virtualization/software defined networking (NFV/SDN). Hebei Mobile works closely with ZTE on the CDN sink optical line termination (OLT), radio access network (RAN) CDN and virtual content delivery network (vCDN).

Unified platform, providing home smart operation

Big Video brings opportunities for the Group’s service innovations and the achievement of its transformation strategy. In order to enrich full-service products and video content as well as improve self-operation capability, Hebei Mobile decided to build a unified home service smart operation platform. The platform will realize the unified service management, billing management and terminal management, so as to help the operator manage and control service development.

Up until now, only basic services such as live TV, video on demand (VOD) and TV on demand (TVOD) have been launched via the platform. More value-added services are planned as well such as multi-screen interaction, smart advertising, smart operation and maintenance (O&M), anti-stealing links, and real-time messaging protocol (RTMP) for accelerated sending in future.

With almost 20 years’ experience in the field of video, ZTE has pioneered research into and the commercial use of, the Big Video platform and iCDN. Currently, ZTE maintains its Big Video IPTV/OTT market share, which is the largest in the world with 90 commercial user cases, an 80 million system capacity, and more than 100 CDN user cases with a total concurrent capacity of more than 100Tbps.