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China Unicom Ltd. ("China Unicom") is the sole integrated telecom services provider in China, with nationwide mobile networks, and over 100 million mobile subscribers in total. It is among the global top10 mobile operators.

Milestones

In May 2006, Huawei's GSM BTSs were deployed for 6,500 TRXs in 15 service areas of Guangdong Unicom.

In May 2006, Huawei's GSM BTSs were applied to over 10,000 TRXs in the GSM network of Hebei Unicom, with the network covering above 70% of the province and providing services to the local networks of 10 prefecture-level cities.

In April 2006, Heilongjiang Unicom selected Huawei to swap a GSM network with over 300 BTSs.

China Unicom adopting EnerG GSM solution

Huawei offers innovative GSM solution and services focusing on the challenges and needs of China Unicom. Huawei's GSM devices have been applied widely in the 31 provincial branches of China Unicom. In the 2006 China Unicom Centralized Purchasing Project, Huawei was selected to provide 41,000 TRXs, and 29 new networks, a share of 21%, and to swap 19 local networks in Harbin, Mianyang and so on. Huawei's mobile softswitch was admitted to many major markets, such as Beijing, Guangdong, Zhejiang, Sichuan, Liaoning, Hubei and Heilongjiang, accounting for 60% of the total gross purchase volume.

Network adjustment helps China Unicom improve competitiveness

While the number of users is growing rapidly, China Unicom is faced with many challenges brought by equipment aging, homogeneous competition and other factors. Aiming at the practical needs of China Unicom, Huawei has tailored a quick and cost-effective network adjustment plan, which incorporates Huawei's full series of high-performance BTS products for various applications. For example, the all-in-one outdoor station supports a wider range of power input, higher ambient temperatures and a variety of transmission modes, and provides a high protection class of IP55; the existing stations and the auxiliary equipments of the equipment room can be fully utilized. With the full automatic network planning, optimization and swapping tools available, full automatic planning and automatic data configuration can be done by inheriting the key parameters of the existing network devices, thereby shortening network delivery period. The Heilongjiang Project of China Unicom is one of the successful cases.

Heilongjiang's capital Harbin has a population of over 3 million. The densely-populated downtown area provides tremendous traffic. As the leading provider of mobile communication services in Harbin, China Unicom, Harbin Branch needed a more competitive radio network solution to cope with new service demand as business grows. The network adjustment plan offered by Huawei optimizes the network-wide devices of Harbin totally and provides a thorough solution to the existing problems; in the transformation, there was no need for the data of the existing network devices, thus the requirement for steady, safe transformation was perfectly satisfied.

This project was a network adjustment in a densely populated urban area, involving hundreds of BTSs. To reduce the impact on end users, the project required a smooth transition.

The Huawei network planning team made more reasonable restructuring of the whole network based on preliminary mass information collection and processing, and finally finished the adjustment within only 24 days using a range of optimization methods. The network experienced 12 cutovers, with the longest one lasting 4 consecutive days and the largest one involving the replacement of 48 BTSs in one night. With the last global frequency re-planning done after the full-network cutover, the network not only went through a smooth transition, but also had significantly improved performance.

The network indicators improved on a full scale by 20.3% where coverage level is greater than -75 dBm and 7.31% where it is greater than -85 dBm. China Unicom was finally satisfied with the progress and the effect of the network adjustment.