With HGC Win, Infinera Aims at C-RAN

Hutchison Global Communications is upgrading its metro capabilities in its home market of Hong Kong with some help from Infinera. HGC is deploying Infinera’s TM-Series Mobile Fronthaul solution as it prepares for the advent of 5G and all the extra bandwidth that will be required to hook up towers and small cells to make it happen.

It’s another interesting data point along the path of Infinera’s plans for last year’s Transmode acquisition. Since acquiring the Swedish vendor, Infinera has had a string of wins for the metro optical gear, but this one is the first we’ve seen in the mobile fronthaul arena.  It’s quite clear that in today’s market infrastructure at the edge is currently more sexy than infrastructure at the core.

While 5G is the buzzword that consumers will see, increasingly the underlying technology and acronym that network operators are talking about is C-RAN. By centralizing parts of what used to be colocated at the cell site deeper in the network using shared resources, they hope to improve the economics and operations of increasingly complicated hybrid fiber and wireless infrastructure.

The densely populated markets and highly connected markets of the Far East have been at the forefront of this, and hence Infinera surely hopes that its win with HGC establishes the vendor’s place at a new table even farther from its roots in core DWDM transport. We’ll be seeing C-RAN hit the US in New York City first, most likely, with Verizon likely leading the way as it prepares for 5G.

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Categories: Metro fiber · Telecom Equipment · Wireless