ZTE provided a mission-critical, high-speed data transmission system to help Alibaba Group handle a record-breaking surge in online shopping traffic on Singles Day in China. 

The November-11 holiday, where people celebrate their single life, is the busiest day of the year for Internet retailers in China.

The ZXONE 8700, ZTE’s series of 100G-per-second optical transport network systems, carried 90% of Alibaba’s operating data traffic on the holiday, as a surge in online shopping orders pushed its peak data traffic to almost 300G-per-second for seven hours.

The unprecedented network traffic volume on Alibaba’s platforms throughout the day presented the strongest ever test of the ZXONE 8700’s capabilities.

In anticipation of the holiday, ZTE created a special task force to support Alibaba, developing contingency plans and emergency solutions, and conducted meticulous testing of core systems and backup equipment.

Network specialists and product development engineers at ZTE collaborated to develop a comprehensive set of solutions intended for various emergency scenarios, ensuring speedy system fault diagnosis and fast replacement of malfunctioning equipment to provide rapid service recovery.

ZTE’s special Alibaba taskforce provided round-the-clock support in the run-up to the day at more than 10 of Alibaba’s OTN wide area networks (WAN) sites. A fleet of emergency vehicles was on standby for rapid deployment at Alibaba’s Hangzhou headquarters.

ZTE won the Alibaba contract is June 2013 for the 100G optical transport network (OTN), and was entrusted to help build the broadband network infrastructure to support Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms, which include Alibaba.com, Taobao Marketplace, Tmall.com, eTao, Alipay, Juhuasuan and Alibaba Cloud Computing.