The operator, which currently boasts 255 million mobile and 135 million fixed broadband customers, will be offering its 5G services using spectrum in the 3.5 GHz band, and, as a result, will need to build out a more dense radio access network to account for the resulting shorter reach. China Telecom currently estimates it will need to deploy between 2 million and 2.5 million 5G-enabled basestations (compared with the 1.16 million 4G LTE-enabled basestations it currently operates), with each basestation requiring fronthaul transport links of up to 25 Gbit/s which will then feed into mid-haul and backhaul links with up to 100 Gbit/s of capacity.As a result, China Telecom is currently planning and building out a new optical transport network -- coupled with the deployment of edge computing capabilities -- with three separate and distinct projects for its backbone, metro and fiber access networks. The key requirements are greater capacity, lower latency and very high-precision synchronization, especially for services that need to be coordinated across multiple basestations.