HKBN Partners with H3C to Accelerate Present and Future Growth

Data Brief

Future-proof technology supports today and tomorrow’s business growth for HKBN and its end-customers

High performance and reliability for bandwidth-intensive applications

Definite operation efficiency with simplified network management

Client's Testimony

“When we select a solution, we strive to bring benefits not only to our company and partners but also our end-users. The deployment of the new switch series has signified our continuous partnership with H3C, while enabling our end-users to connect more devices and run a wide range of bandwidth-intensive applications without interruptions. After all, this is a winning solution for three parties.”

Danny Li

Co-Owner & Chief Technology Officer

HKBN Group

Relevant Products: S5800 Ethernet Switches, S6890 Data Center Switches, intelligent Network Management Center

Relevant Solutions: Residential and Commercial Internet Broadband Service

HKBN Group (“HKBN”) is a leading integrated telecom and technology solutions provider in Asia, offering a comprehensive range of premier one-stop Information and Communications Technology (ICT) solutions to both the enterprise and residential markets. With an exponential growth in customer base and increasing service demand for bandwidth-intensive applications, HKBN has joined hands with its long-term digital transformation partner H3C to upgrade its network to cope with today’s customer needs and get prepared for future business expansion.

In the digital era, it is more affordable for end-users to access multi-media contents than before and they tend to run bandwidth-hungry applications on the Internet, leading to a huge surge in Internet traffic.

After the COVID-19 outbreak, remote working is rapidly on the increase and is changing how the global workspace operates. Starting from adopting a stay-at-home approach, work-from-home measures have been imposed almost all over the world, many people stay at home and engage in bandwidth-intensive activities such as video streaming, video conferences, virtual reality and augmented reality experiences, to name a few.

“User behavior and requirements have changed rapidly. We see a rise of multi-screen households to access various types of contents especially video on the Internet. The bandwidth usage per household has ramped up in recent years,” said Danny Li, Co-Owner & Chief Technology Officer at HKBN Group.

In view of transformative growth of subscribers, changing user habits and requirements, HKBN works closely with business partners at different levels to maintain network reliability as well as future-proof its capabilities. With the network equipment enhancement, the telecom giant can cater to the ever-changing customer needs and rapid business growth for now and the years ahead.

H3C plays an important role in HKBN’s network infrastructure. The latter has been using H3C S5800 Ethernet switch series in its aggregation layer of both GPON (Gigabit Passive Optical Networks) and Ethernet access since 2012. They serve as the gateway switches for both the residential and enterprise IP services.

The enhanced H3C S6890 series provides strong capabilities for Layer 2 security such as port security, DHCP snooping, dynamic Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) inspection and IP source guard. To fulfil the ISP grade requirements, it supports QinQ and VLAN mapping features that can cope with the complex Layer 2 network.

Furthermore, S6890 series delivers enhanced Layer 3 capabilities such as Open Shortest Path First (OSPF), Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), and IPv6 routing including OSPFv3 and BGP4+. It is also compliant with industry standards for connectivity and interoperability, providing seamless integration with technologies from other vendors. As a next generation data center switch to support the trend of SDN, it is also a cloud ready product which supports technologies such as VXLAN, Openflow and EVPN.

The engineers of both companies conducted a POC (proof of concept) with thorough testing on the new switch series. Future scaling capability, high performance, operation efficiency, professional pre-sales and post-sales support are the reasons for HKBN to adopt the S6890 switch series.

Future-proof technology enables flexible today and future planning

“The commitment from H3C R&D to continuous features and network capacity scaling enhancement is important to further strengthening our partnership for the business growth of both,” Li noted.

H3C’s R&D team and technical team in Mainland China and Hong Kong respectively have performed a seamless collaboration to build a customized switch solution, which is scalable for current and future business growth. Prior to the switch installation, a series of tests were conducted covering product features and interconnection with other network equipment to ensure HKBN’s stringent standards are met.

The number of users on a network typically grows over time. With high port density, S6890 switch series can be scaled up alongside the growing business of HKBN. By adding new switches, they can now connect more devices easily on the network which gives HKBN the flexibility for future expansion and growth by catering to the needs of customers.

Continuous access to network at high speed and low latency

The speed of network connection is of utmost concern to customers. The applications in use, the amount of traffic generated from each device and the quality of service (QoS) influence the performance of switches.

H3C S6890 switch series comes with 10G/100G high-performance and QoS capabilities. It provides high density access with large buffer to address burst traffic in networks. The robust capability enables HKBN to provide a reliable and low latency network environment for customers.

Residential and enterprise customers could have continuous access to the HKBN network and run bandwidth-intensive or business critical applications at a fast speed without interruptions.

“Its small form factor layout with high port density of 10G/100G makes it a perfect match on HKBN requirements for mass deployment,” said Li.

Operation efficiency and professional support

H3C’s certified technical experts provide professional pre-sales and post-sales support to keep HKBN’s network up and running. The all-rounded customer support frees HKBN’s IT staff from time-consuming, repetitive network configuration and upgrade tasks. Now they can concentrate their efforts on other mission-critical tasks with peace of mind.

Technicians from H3C visit HKBN office regularly to support the latter in managing the new switch series. They also arrange product update and maintenance training for HKBN’s operation teams and engineers every quarter.

HKBN has already deployed hundreds of the new S6890 series. The upgrade project is scheduled for completion in the next two years. Looking forward, H3C will continue to provide more high-quality products and solutions for the development of HKBN’s professional-grade, comprehensive broadband and ICT solutions, and facilitate connectivity to enter the new stage of development.