China has always been the biggest driving force behind Cloud-RAN. China Mobile mooted the concept initially, and while its ideas have been adapted to suit all kinds of scenarios, Chinese carriers remain the most ambitious deployers. China Telecom is building a fronthaul network which it says will lay the foundations for a 4G/5G Cloud-RAN, enabling it to improve urban density and expand LTE coverage. The fronthaul network, in north-east Liaoning province, is based on Huawei’s Blade OTN (optical transport network) solution. It will support long-range links between cell sites and virtualized, centralized basebands, but will also provide high speed fronthaul for clusters of small cells. These will be essential for China Telecom’s local affiliate, Liaoning Telecom, to support dense urban…