Mexico GTAC joins forces with Huawei to commercially deploy 800G backbone network, which is leading the large capacity DWDM network in LATAM. At Mobile World Congress 2024 in Barcelona, Emilio Flores Madero, CEO of GTAC, and Victor Zhou, president of the Optical Transmission Domain at Huawei, tell Tony Poulos about the developments in GTAC’s journey to becoming one of the largest bandwidth operators in Mexico and the how the company is expanding its 400G deployment and the rollout of 800G in core sites that GTAC is expecting to receive from Huawei.

GTAC is one of the largest bandwidth operators in Mexico with 175 national sites, covering more than 90% of the population in Mexico. GTAC was established in 2010, to provide national bandwidth for its three partners – Megacable, Televisa and Telefónica. Huge capacity is required to support high-volume traffic for these three mainstream operators. GTAC uses the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE)’s fiber, which allows it to maximise capacity in one pair of fiber – a good investment option.

For these reasons, GTAC partnered with Huawei to illuminate more than 25,000 kilometres of optical fiber resources to provide bandwidth services. This continuous innovation and evolution helped make GTAC the most important OTN wholesale bandwidth provider, with traffic volumes boosting it compound annual growth rate (CAGR) by 40%. With a stable resilient network, it also offers high-quality service-level agreements (SLAs), which is an important KPI in the cloud era. The compliance with operational KPIs ensures fast and stable growth for GTAC.

Currently, GTAC is achieving a transmission capacity of around 75 Tbps, allowing it to transmit some 122 million songs in 60 seconds, a huge capacity for Mexico. It has seven vendors who use its network, mainly Tevevisa, Magecable and Telefónica. Vendors also include AT&T and Totalplay, while the other one, which is part of the government, is ALTÁN Redes, the Mexican company responsible for designing, developing, operating and marketing the shared Network for Everyone.

“We have a network that features big, big bandwidth. Its high reliability and agile infrastructure give us a very good time-to-market (TTM) service. But we are not stopping here,” said Emilio Flores Madero, CEO of GTAC. “Our network will evolve to use Super C band with 6THz frequency, in the core nodes deployment 800G per wavelength to increase capacity by four times and reduce cost per bit more by than 30%. The capacity has reached 75 Tbps, meeting the transmission requirements of the huge traffic areas. In addition, 3D-mesh networks are built on some links where frequent fiber cuts are detected to improve network availability.”

There is also an impressive cost reduction of around 30%, but GTAC is committed to continuing the growth of network capacity by expanding the 400G deployment already started and the rollout of 800G in core sites that GTAC is expecting to receive from Huawei.

“We are going to start to commercialise it in the next couple of months. We’re really very, very excited that all the tests that we did went very well, and it’s very, very fast. Now we need to enhance the network automation and the management of that network, which is really important and key for the things that we do and what we’re looking at in the future,” said Madero. The goal is to serve more users and more enterprises. GTAC now serves more than 60 million people with over 3,000 services.

Victor Zhou, president of the Optical Transmission Domain at Huawei, said: “Carriers who seize AI-era opportunities can grow their businesses. Huawei has launched new generation 400G and 800G products that can reach 28% longer distances than the industry. The cost per bit of 400G is 50% lower than that of 100G. 400G is for a longer-distance backbone, and 800G is for metro and short DC connections. These solutions can provide better TCO to our customers. We have deployed more than one-hundred 400G/800G networks globally.”

“We are glad to work with GTAC to deploy the 800G and Super C commercial network. This marks an important milestone for Huawei’s ultra-high-speed and large-capacity optical transport network (OTN) solution. In the future, Huawei will continue to innovate and provide high-quality, high-reliability and sustainable optical transmission solutions to help GTAC achieve business success in digital transformation.”

The 400G/800G mesh backbone is the evolution direction, and new speed generation can provide multiple benefits for industry. Mesh networks can reduce network latency and offer very high availability. Huawei will continue to innovate and provide high-quality and high-reliability networks.