Challenges
China’s booming economy places great demands on the country’s power plants. Henan Power Company has responded with an aggressive expansion program. As new facilities come on-line, demand for more bandwidth capacity in the company’s internal communications network has also grown rapidly.
Solution
Henan Power deployed ECI’s XDM®-1000 Multi-Service Transport Platform (MSTP), supplying integrated SDH (synchronous digital hierarchy) and Ethernet services over both 2.5 Gbps and 10 Gbps bandwidths with a range of 200+ kilometers. The network is expected to serve nearly 500 locations.
Results
Improving operational and administrative backbone performance from 622 Mbps to 10 Gbps, the ECI-based network is a key factor in enabling Henan Power to increase productivity and make electric power transmission and distribution safer, more reliable, and more economical by allowing the company to introduce advanced technologies for power system protection, automation, control, and monitoring.
ECI technology powers critical communications network
As the Chinese economy continues to grow, with GDP increases of more than 10% year-overyear, the demand for power will increase. Henan Power Company, one of the largest power utilities in the State Grid Corporation of China, has potentially the largest provincial power transmission network in China, and will continue to grow over the next few years – while at the same time moving away from air-polluting sources of energy. The company closed several coal plants and plans to build around 200 new, high-efficiency power plants over the next five years.
When Henan Power developed the five-year plan to create its advanced next-generation power transmission grid, the company chose ECI to expand its optical communications network capacity. ECI is the lead communications-equipment supplier for the South Ring, covering 11 cities (primarily in the southern part of Henan Province). The new network provides greater communication speed and capacity to Henan Power’s electric generation plants and other facilities.
“Henan Province is the most populous province in China,” said Mr. Lin S.X., Vice General Manager of Henan Power. “It is very important for us to build the new optical communication network upon reliable and scalable equipment so that our plants, which supply millions of residents with power, run smoothly and efficiently. After evaluating all the major suppliers, we found that ECI met our requirements, allowing us to cost-effectively deploy the network and provide our plants with greater communications bandwidth.”
Henan Power’s ECI-based optical network supports grid automation, including teleprotection, operational voice, surveillance video, and grid monitoring, enabling the introduction of advanced services such as automated meter reading, power quality monitoring, and load management. The new telecommunications system is the heart of the company’s power infrastructure, providing intelligent monitoring, diagnostics, and control of Henan Power’s generation, transmission, and distribution systems.
An unmatched combination of capabilities
With 120 locations already implemented, Henan Power plans to install ECI’s XDM-1000 Multi-Service Transport Platform units in nearly 500 locations in the course of the five-year plan. ECI’s XDM provides high capacity SDH and Ethernet services with full low-order crossconnect functionality and with long-haul optical capabilities – a combination unavailable with other vendors. This capability allows for seamless scalability and easier network commissioning and provisioning of new services.
Starting in 2007, Henan Power began deploying ECI’s MCS/M Carrier Ethernet line cards on the XDM. These cards provide quality-assured Layer 1 (physical layer) and Layer 2 (data link layer) Ethernet services and support MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching). MPLS provides SDH-like reliability and sustainability for Ethernet traffic, enabling carrier-class Ethernet services with higher scalability, improved reliability, and superior manageability. The company operates the network using ECI’s LightSoft® multi-layer network management system, which delivers an end-to-end solution to monitor and control the different equipment, network segments, and technologies under one system.
Supporting China’s growing power industry
ECI, a supplier of optical equipment in the Chinese power market for more than ten years, is a top vendor in China – having more than 20% market share, according to sales revenue in the region. Furthermore, 15 other power utilities in China selected ECI – including companies in the top five, such as Beijing Power. “We are honored to be chosen to supply Henan Power’s new optical network, and it is an added bonus to support the move towards more environmentally sound energy plants,” said Jennifer Tang, ECI Telecom’s President, Sales & Marketing, China. “This contract further emphasizes ECI’s growing leadership in China’s power market. It demonstrates our ability to provide advanced, state-of-the-art technology that meets the challenges for any type of network.”
Benefits delivered: The ECI product solution met Henan Power’s requirements by providing:
- Large capacity (120/60 Gbps) with full low order (VC12) non-blocking matrix, making it easy to control traffic
- Flexible platform offers a cost-effective solution
- High product reliability ensures the power grid operates smoothly
- High-integration, high-density cards (such as the 84x2M/card and the GE+FE/card) support more ports than other vendors with similar offerings, reducing hardwareinvestment costs
- Easy maintenance
- Easy network upgrade (from 2.5 Gbps to 10 Gbps)
- Lower cost of maintenance, lower operating expense
- The high reliability and flexibility of ECI equipment help reduce both capital and operating expenses, thus improving profitability
- ECI provides excellent local service support
Full HO/LO matrix: ECI offers the full HO/LO (high order/low order) matrix on a single interface card. This is in contrast to other vendors’ implementations, which require separate interface cards or separate chassis – and, in some cases, offer a smaller matrix for low order traffic, or none at all. This ECI capability enables lower capital expense. At the same time, the resulting smaller hardware footprint helps lower costs of ownership and operations, because the company’s communications engineers must manage a single platform, instead of multiple pieces of equipment. ECI technology also provides Henan Power with the flexibility to re-configure the cross-connect setup dynamically, enabling the network to keep pace with the company’s growth.
High reliability and scalability: High reliability is critical to Henan Power, as its customers – both residential and enterprise – expect always-on service. Scalability, allowing easy upgrades and expansion, is also critical.
Any card, any slot: The innovative design of the ECI XDM platform enables Henan to install any interface card into any card slot to support any type of traffic – data, voice or video. This is unlike other products, which have limited capability per card slot. The high-density cards on the XDM platform give ECI a technical advantage over competitors. The cards can even be interchanged between different products in the XDM family.
Easy system management: The ECI LightSoft Network Management System (NMS) enables Henan Power’s technical team to manage the ECI MSTP platform with minimal increase in staff, which helps lower operating costs.
About Henan Power Henan Power Company, the fifth largest power utility in the State Grid Corporation of China (www.sgcc.com.cn), operates power plants throughout Henan Province, the most populous province in China. Founded in 2002, SGCC’s core business is to provide a secure and reliable power supply to 128 million customers across a service area equivalent to 88% of the national territory of China. In 2005, SGCC ranked 40th in the Fortune Global 500.