China Mobile today announced the successful deployment of ZTE's cloud-based 5G-transport management and control system, Zenic One, in the Guangdong province of China. The deployment is the latest collaboration between the two China-based companies.

The deployment, which began last July in the cloud resource pool of China Mobile's Guangdong branch, aims to improve operational efficiency and address challenges with service principal name network management. ZTE claims its Zenic One system enabled China Mobile to achieve unified management of 150,000 packet-based transport network elements within the region.

Additionally, the vendor says the system scales in excess of 300,000 network elements — including those using IP radio access networks and optical transport networks — thanks to its cloud-native underpinnings and business support management and control system.

Meanwhile, integrated artificial intelligence (AI) and big data analysis enables Zenic One to gather device information in real-time to monitor the network status, pinpoint problems, and recover services.

This is far from the first time China Mobile has leaned on ZTE to address network challenges and extend the scope of the its offerings.

In early April, the telecommunications vendor helped China Mobile send what it claimed to be China's first 5G message based on the GSMA UP2.4 standard. ZTE's 5G Message Center is built on a cloud-based NFV architecture with backward compatibility with 2G, 3G, 4G messaging standards, and support for new rich media messages and chatbot applications.

Late last year, ZTE also partnered with China Mobile to provision mobile edge computing-based 5G network slicing services within the telecom's Guangdong branch. ZTE claims the system supports local software and hardware acceleration, AI video rendering, and high-performance route distribution across layers three to seven.