Despite the pressures mounting on the Chinese vendors, Huawei continues to trumpet its leadership in 5G RAN, while ZTE is targeting pole position in the transport network. It has published a white paper to promote its solutions in this area, called ‘Meeting 5G Transport Requirements With FlexE’. The white paper sets out the goals and key technologies of the 5G transport network and provides a technical blueprint. It identifies four main technology aspects, all (of course) supported by FlexE. These are on-demand bandwidth provision; ultra-low latency with ultra-stable jitter forwarding; ultra-high reliability; and flexible end-to-end network slicing. For the first of these, the solution proposes large-port bonding to cope with the bandwidth upgrade needed for 5G, so that operators can…