Kathy Gibson reports – Optical networks have seen huge improvements in cost and capacity over time – with most of that coming with the invention of fibre.
Submarine networks are responsible for connecting the planet, says Vladimir Kozlov, CEO and founder of LightCounting, speaking at Huawei’s Green All-Optical Network Summit. And the same fibre technology went on to connect cities too, with the introduction of metro and access networks.
“Once fibre is deployed you can do a lot, and improve bandwidth substantially,” he says.
DWDM networks will continue to evolve, with more flexibility and automation on users’ wish lists, according to research from LightCounting.
Automation is the best option to improve reliability, manage traffic fluctuations and reduce operational expenses. Indeed, connectivity between cloud data centres and users is the most important utility service now.
The second priority identified by the survey is higher data rates, with lower cost and power consumption. This needs to happen even as fibre capacity increases.
Kozlov warns, however, that continuing to reduce power consumption could become an issue over time and as bandwidth improves.
There is no future for copper cables in the new world, Kozlov says. And fibre to the room (FTTR) is quickly becoming the next generation of FTTH (fibre to the home), with fibre set to extend to more users than ever before.
He points out that shipments of optical transceivers for FTTH are at 100-million per year, and the capacity of these is increasing steadily. Service providers tend to supply the highest-possible speed available and Kozlov expects that 50Gb PON will soon standard.
LightCounting points out that, with optical distribution networks critical for connecting users, keeping them simple is key, so intelligence is quickly being built into the distribution network.
Today, Richard Jin, Huawei’s vice-president and president of the optical business product line, spoke about the importance of fibre communication to society’s development, and introduced Huawei’s eight key technological breakthroughs in optical access and transmission as well as their benefits to the industry.
Fibre networks have become future-oriented strategic infrastructure. During the evolution from F5G to F5.5G, technological innovations in industrial production and fibre sensing will further unleash the potential of fibre and open up new markets.
For F5.5G, Huawei has made eight technological innovations to accelerate industry evolution:
* 50G PON compatibility: 50G PON is the next-generation PON technology released by ITU-T. Through component structure and process innovation, Huawei improves the transmit power and receiver sensitivity of 50G PON optical modules to achieve 40km coverage. In addition, Huawei integrates GPON, 10G PON, and 50G PON in one port using ultra-high precision mounting technologies. This innovation will help operators smoothly upgrade from GPON and 10G PON to 50G PON without reconstructing their live networks, quickly providing ubiquitous 10G experience.
* Super C+L spectrum: Based on experiments and innovations, Huawei has developed a new solution for spectrum amplification and transmission bandwidth improvement. During the manufacturing process, the gas flux and heating temperature are accurately controlled to achieve high concentration doping and improve the amplification gain of the L band. 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 fibre, ushering in the 10G era.
* 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 fibre 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 crystal on silicon (LCOS) to reduce the wavelength selective switching (WSS) LCD response time from 200ms to 100ms, implementing faster wavelength grooming and protection, and building green and agile all-optical networks.
* OptiX Alps-WDM: Huawei launches the innovative Metro WDM pooling solution OptiX Alps-WDM to solve the problems of uneven service distribution, low resource utilisation, and difficult planning on metro networks. Using Huawei-developed WSS, a metro coherent module, and digital optical label technologies, wavelengths can be shared among different access rings in the star networking architecture at the metro access layer, and can be flexibly groomed and adjusted. These technologies increase the bandwidth 10-fold and reduce the carbon emission by 90%, helping operators reduce OPEX by 20%, achieve the target network architecture that moves WDM networks to sites, and realize smooth network evolution in the next 10 years.
* Flexible optical service unit (OSU) service granularities: Huawei’s hard pipe core technology OSU uses hard pipe connections of 2Mbps to 100Gbps. The bandwidth can be flexibly adjusted without interrupting services. The encapsulation protocol is simplified to reduce the service transmission latency. This innovation helps operators build premium OTN WDM networks with high bandwidth, ultra-low latency, and deterministic experience, as well as helping operators win more high-end industry customers.
* FTTR C-WAN architecture: With the rise of smart home appliances, home WiFi networks need to offer extensive coverage, high stability, and high concurrency. However, in traditional WiFi networking, each optical network terminal (ONT) makes decisions independently, which causes problems such as interference and service instability in high-concurrency scenarios. Huawei’s FTTR for Home solution uses the C-WAN centralised management and control architecture to coordinate all ONTs on the entire FTTR network, reducing interference and improving bandwidth experience. In addition, the imperceptible roaming technology can achieve roaming handover within 20ms, providing a brand-new digital home experience.
* Fibre iris technology: The ODN accounts for a high proportion of FTTH investment. However, difficulties in ODN O&M have long plagued the industry. In the past, port resources had to be manually recorded, resulting in resource inaccuracy which in turn led to service provisioning failures. Huawei has released the innovative fibre iris technology to label large numbers of fiber ports. In this way, port resources can be accurately recorded and allocated in real time, enabling rapid service provisioning. The oDSP and AI algorithms are used to accurately and quickly identify the fault locations with a precision of one meter.
* Autonomous networks: In the future, the network scale will increase 10-fold, and intelligent autonomous driving networks will become the mainstream. Huawei has made multiple technological innovations in the autonomous driving network field. For example, StellarGo changes manual and single-factor route section to multi-factor and multi-policy intelligent route selection on transport networks,, and implements personalised recommendations based on different customer habits. The route selection success rate is as high as 99%, and the service provisioning efficiency is improved by 70%. In addition, the StellarCue builds various intelligent experience models and implements one-minute perception of poor-QoE incidents based on massive poor-QoE data training, which can significantly reduce user complaints.
According to Jin, with ubiquitous 10G connections due by 2025, Huawei will continue to make technological breakthroughs and product innovations based on the preceding innovations, and create greater commercial value for operators by improving user experience and network operation efficiency on the way to F5.5G.