Huawei: Unleashing the potential of fiber and moving towards F5.5G

[Bangkok, Thailand, October 27, 2022] During the 8th Ultra-Broadband Forum (UBBF 2022), Richard Jin, Vice President and President of the Optical Business Product Line of Huawei, delivered a speech titled “Unleashing Fiber Potential and Striding to F5.5G”. In this keynote speech, he expressed the importance of optical fiber communications for the development of society, and introduced Huawei’s eight key technological breakthroughs in optical access and transmission and their benefits for the industry. Mr. Jin called on the entire industry chain to work together to advance F5.5G.

Fiber optic networks have become a future-oriented strategic infrastructure. During the evolution from F5G to F5.5G, technological innovations in industrial production and fiber sensing will further unleash the potential of fiber optics and open up new markets. For F5.5G, Huawei has developed eight technological innovations to accelerate the development of the industry.

1. 50G PON Compatibility: 50G PON is the next generation PON technology published by ITU-T. Through component structure and process innovation, Huawei improves the transmission power and receiver sensitivity of 50G optical PON modules to achieve 40km coverage. In addition, Huawei integrates GPON, 10G PON and 50G PON into one port using ultra-high-precision assembly technologies. This innovation will help operators smoothly upgrade from GPON and 10G PON to 50G PON without having to reconstruct their live networks, thus quickly providing a ubiquitous 10G experience.
2. Super C+L Spectrum: Based on experimentation and innovation, Huawei has developed a new solution to enhance spectrum and improve transmission bandwidth. During the manufacturing process, the gas flow and heating temperature are precisely controlled to achieve high concentration doping and improve L-band gain. These innovations increase the Super-C+L transmission spectrum to 12 THz and increase the bandwidth by 50% for higher transmission performance. In addition, the 400G and 800G single wavelength rates can reach 100Tbps per fiber, ushering in the 10G era.
3. Optical Cross Connect (OXC): Huawei OXC uses the 3D dot matrix algorithm to increase the cabling density of the all-optical backplane by 35%, reduces external fiber connections of reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers (ROADMs), reduces the size of the entire system by 90%, and reduces power consumption by more than 60%. In addition, Huawei has developed new materials for OXC liquid crystals on silicon (LCOS) to shorten the LCD wavelength selective switching (WSS) response time from 200ms to 100ms, implement faster wavelength care and protection, and be green and agile all-optical networks.
4. OptiX Alps WDM: Huawei launches innovative metro WDM pooling solution, OptiX Alps-WDM, to solve the problems of uneven service distribution, low resource utilization, and difficult scheduling in metro networks. Using Huawei-developed WSS, a metro coherent module, and digital optical tag technologies, wavelengths can be shared by different access rings in the star network architecture at the metro access layer and flexibly maintained and adjusted. These technologies increase bandwidth by 10x and reduce carbon emissions by 90%, helping operators reduce operational costs by 20%, achieve the targeted network architecture that pushes WDM networks to locations, and has a smooth to realize network development in the next 10 years.
5. Flexible Optical Service Unit (OSU) service granularities.: Huawei’s innovative hard-pipe core technology OSU uses hard-pipe connections from 2 Mbit/s to 100 Gbit/s. The bandwidth can be adjusted flexibly without interrupting services. The encapsulation protocol is simplified to reduce service transmission latency. This innovation helps operators build best-in-class OTN WDM networks with high bandwidth, ultra-low latency, and deterministic experience, helping operators attract more high-end industrial customers.
6. FTTR-C-WAN architecture: With the advent of smart home devices, home Wi-Fi networks are required to provide wide coverage, high stability, and high concurrency. However, in traditional Wi-Fi networks, each optical network terminal (ONT) makes decisions independently, causing issues such as interference and service instability in high concurrency scenarios. Huawei’s FTTR for Home solution uses the centralized C-WAN management and control architecture to coordinate all ONTs across the FTTR network, reducing interference and enhancing the bandwidth experience. In addition, the unique imperceptible roaming technology can achieve roaming handover within 20ms, bringing a brand new digital home experience.
7. Fiber Iris Technology: ODN accounts for a high proportion of FTTH investments. However, the industry has long been plagued by ODN O&M difficulties. In the past, port resources had to be recorded manually, resulting in resource inaccuracies that in turn led to service delivery failures. Huawei has released the innovative fiber iris technology to label a large number of fiber optic connectors. In this way, port resources can be accurately accounted for and allocated in real time, enabling rapid service delivery. The oDSP and AI algorithms are used to accurately and quickly identify the fault locations with an accuracy of one meter.
8. autonomous networks: In the future, the network size will increase 10 times, and intelligent autonomous driving networks will become mainstream. Huawei has brought several technological innovations in the field of autonomous driving networks. For example, StellarGo changes manual and one-factor route leg to intelligent multi-factor and multi-policy route selection in transportation networks and implements personalized recommendations based on different customer habits. The route selection success rate is up to 99%, and the service delivery efficiency is improved by 70%. In addition, StellarCue builds various intelligent experience models and implements one-minute perception of poor-QoE incidents based on massive poor-QoE data training, which can greatly reduce user complaints.

According to Mr. Jin, with ubiquitous 10G connections due by 2025, Huawei will continue to make technological breakthroughs and product innovations based on the previous innovations, and create greater commercial value for operators by improving user experience and network operation efficiency along the way upgraded to F5 0.5G. In conclusion, Richard Jin called for the collective efforts of the whole industry to promote the F5.5G industry and work towards F5.5G.