China Mobile, the world’s largest mobile network operator, is inching closer to deploying a standalone (SA) 5G network riding on a 5G core. ZTE today said it supplied its routers to power a 5G core network for the operator in Jilin, a province in northeastern China.

The Chinese vendor and operator are longtime collaborators. ZTE earlier this year won bids to provide China Mobile with network equipment for its 5G core in 12 provinces and was awarded a 35% share of the operator’s 5G core in another 31 provinces. 

ZTE’s ZXR10 M6000-18S routers are serving the user plane function channel emulator (UPF CE) on China Mobile’s 5G core network in Jilin. This framework, which delivers the ingress of the network cloud, connects switching equipment on the UPF core layer, maintains routing information outside the UPF, according to ZTE.

The routers simultaneously connect equipment inside and outside of China Mobile’s 5G core, ZTE explained. The operating system for ZTE’s ZXR10 M6000-18S routers also feature Ethernet VPN (EVPN), multicast bit indexed explicit replication, and segment routing via IP version 6 (IPv6) to support continued evolution of the IP network, according to ZTE.

The vendor also claims the ZXR10 M6000-18S routers are also equipped with single-slot 800 Gb/s network processor chips. 

China Mobile earlier this month said it has deployed more than 180,000 5G base stations in more than 50 cities. While China’s trio of operators formed the world’s largest 5G network when they were activated in November 2019, the operators have fallen behind on the race to deploy a 5G SA network. That framework, which separates 5G network traffic and operation from legacy 4G LTE infrastructure, is a critical difference-maker in delivering true 5G.

T-Mobile US earlier this month activated the world’s first 5G SA network operating on a 5G core. China’s operators contributed to the standardization of 3GPP’s Release 16, which formalized the framework for a 5G SA core network, but their respective commercialization efforts are still under development.

China Mobile recently said it has “worked to speed up the construction of the 5G SA core network to lay a foundation for achieving the scale commercialization of SA within this year.”

The operator ended the first half of 2020 with 70.2 million 5G subscribers. It is expected to deploy a 5G SA network later this year with equipment from ZTE, Huawei, and Ericsson.