Industry Thought Leadership

Looking back on the history of the optical industry, we can clearly see that service changes are the driving force behind its innovation and development. The continuous upgrade of optical technology accelerates service development. Since 2009, with the rapid popularization of video services, fiber has become increasingly popular and copper has declined in home networks. 100 Mbps FTTH optical access had become a necessity for home broadband, driving OTN transmission networks from 10G to 100G. Around 2018, as 4K HD video, short video, and smart home services grew rapidly, users were willing to pay for better Wi-Fi and wired networks. This drove the upgrade of home broadband to Gbps and the fast growth of home networking services. Premium enterprise private lines made OTN transmission networks more than just customer bearer networks, but also service networks. To date, the number of global gigabit users has exceeded 200 million, the number of FTTR users has exceeded 20 million, OTN transmission networks have been upgraded to 400G on a large scale, and extending all-optical nodes of OTN transmission networks to network edges has gradually become the norm among global operators.

In the intelligent era, the optical industry is faced with a new challenge to enable people to utilize intelligence as easily and freely as electricity. We believe that an F5.5G all-optical 10 Gbps and premium transmission capability target network must be built to do so. The 10 Gbps intelligent access network provides ubiquitous and ultra-broadband 10 Gbps bandwidth, enabling users to experience intelligent services anytime, anywhere.

Looking to the next decade, the most important change in the ICT industry will be intelligence. According to predictions from related organizations, the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of global intelligence-related investment will reach 26.9%, and intelligence will be put to use by enterprises, households, and individuals. Leading Internet enterprises will compete for AI foundation models. Government agencies and financial institutions will deploy intelligence in their activities, including in disaster prediction, public security, financial risk control, and marketing. Vertical industries such as manufacturing and electric power will also begin to explore AI applications. At an individual level, intelligent services such as robots, AI assistants, cloud eSports, cloud computers, and smart homes will provide novel interaction experiences in entertainment and life. Traditional living spaces are rapidly going smart.

In the intelligent era, the optical industry is faced with a new challenge to enable people to utilize intelligence as easily and freely as electricity. We believe that an F5.5G all-optical 10 Gbps and premium transmission capability target network must be built to do so. The 10 Gbps intelligent access network provides ubiquitous and ultra-broadband 10 Gbps bandwidth, enabling users to experience intelligent services anytime, anywhere. The premium transmission network provides high-quality connections to computing and satisfies the high-quality connection requirements of distributed data center architectures.

10 Gbps Intelligent Access Network: Ubiquitous 10 Gbps, Differentiated Computing Power Access, and Intelligent Applications with Computing-Network Convergence
In households, services such as AI assistant, 4K cloud eSports, cloud NAS, and smart healthcare are promoting the evolution of home networks to "connectivity+computing+intelligence" applications, posing higher requirements on networks. Take 4K cloud eSports as an example: if users want to play large-scale 3A games on the cloud without using local high-configuration hosts, the access network must provide guaranteed 300 Mbps bandwidth with a latency lower than 5 ms. If ultra-fast cloud NAS needs to back up photos, videos, and files to the cloud in seconds to achieve the same experience as storage on local hard disks, symmetric upstream and downstream bandwidth of 10 Gbps is required. To meet the requirements of new services, we believe that the access network needs to evolve to a 10 Gbps intelligent access network, which has the following features.

First, ubiquitous 10 Gbps access: 50G PON implements 10 Gbps to the home, and Wi-Fi 7 implements FTTR to increase the access rate by 10 times, from 1 Gbps to 10 Gbps. In this way, the access network provides local-like experience for intelligent services such as AI assistant, ultra-fast cloud NAS, cloud eSports, and cloud rendering. To date, more than 30 operators around the world have cooperated with Huawei to complete a series of commercial deployments and verification of 10 Gbps optical networks based on 50G PON. These include China Telecom Shanghai's 10 Gbps cloud broadband community, China Unicom Beijing's 10 Gbps live broadcast base, and China Mobile Yunnan's 10 Gbps campus. All these indicate that F5.5G all-optical 10 Gbps networks have entered commercial construction.

Second, deterministic experience: The access network needs to use intelligent service steering to upgrade best-effort experience to deterministic experience with guaranteed quality. The ONT transmission network identifies computing, video, and Internet access services based on service flow characteristics, and uses the intelligent E2E hard slicing technology from home Wi-Fi to the CO OLT of the access network to distribute computing services to premium bearer networks. Doing so achieves deterministic 10 Gbps bandwidth, 1 ms latency, and µs-level jitter.

In households, services such as AI assistant, 4K cloud eSports, cloud NAS, and smart healthcare are promoting the evolution of home networks to "connectivity + computing + intelligence" applications, posing higher requirements on networks.

Third, intelligent applications with computing-network convergence: Through the sharing and openness of computing power on FTTR and the CO OLT of the access network, more innovative applications can be enabled to accelerate operators' experience monetization. For example, on the FTTR side, computing power and storage are converged to provide instant shooting and uploading, smart albums, and "local storage+cloud disk" backup for users. In addition, FTTR is integrated with sensing to detect activities based on Wi-Fi signal fluctuation, protecting home privacy and security. On the CO OLT of the access network, a high-performance computing engine is used to analyze users' application-level data. This helps operators provide services such as experience evaluation, potential customer identification, poor-QoE analysis, and experience optimization for users, achieving experience monetization.

Premium Transmission Network: High-Quality One Hop to Computing and Inter-Computing-Center Interconnection
In the Internet era, Internet access and video services were not real-time, and were not sensitive to network latency and packet loss. Operators and OTT providers built centralized data centers to serve users. With the advent of the intelligent era, enterprises' and home users' intelligent applications have higher requirements on network connection quality. Data centers are evolving towards a multi-layer and distributed architecture to meet differentiated bandwidth and latency requirements of services. For example, in the finance and government sectors, customers require that data be stored locally and trained on the cloud. This means the bandwidth from the cloud to the campus network must be higher than Tbps. In distributed computing power collaboration scenarios, if network latency exceeds 1 ms, the computing power efficiency will be greatly reduced. In addition, abnormal network interruption will cause AI training rollback.

Therefore, we believe that operators need a premium transmission network with high bandwidth, low latency, and high reliability. It will implement the high-speed interconnection and efficient collaboration of multiple data centers and provide one-click access and on-tap computing power services for various industries. The premium transmission network features the following.

To date, more than 30 operators around the world have cooperated with Huawei to complete a series of commercial deployments and veri-fication of 10 Gbps optical networks based on 50G PON.

First, the 400G 3D-mesh backbone transmission network: Based on a 3D-mesh architecture, backbone network nodes are connected with the shortest distance using optical cables. Moreover, an ultra-high-speed optical plane is added to hotspot areas to upgrade planar traffic to 3D traffic, preventing network congestion in the hotspot areas and building a data highway between computing centers. In terms of bandwidth, with the maturity of the industry chain, OTN networks are moving towards 400G. The 400G rate replaces the conventional 100G/200G rate, reducing the per-bit cost by more than 30%. The reduction in the number of occupied wavelengths also reduces O&M costs and brings considerable technical dividends. In terms of reliability, based on the multi-path protection of optical-electrical synergy ASON, the backup path is automatically restored, the network can withstand multiple fiber cuts, and each protection switching time is shorter than 50 ms. This ensures that network availability reaches 99.9999% and computing power is accessible as long as there is a path.

Second, the 1 ms one-hop metro transmission network: The architecture needs to be upgraded in two directions — horizontal and vertical. In the horizontal direction, a metro core full-mesh network is built to resolve the high latency caused by data center interconnect (DCI) route detours in a ring network architecture. It enables one-hop connection between DCs, and implements 1 ms high-speed interconnection between computing centers. In the vertical direction, OTN is extended to network edges. OXC is used to upgrade port connections and electrical signal switching to optical switching as well as build an E2E all-optical switching network. This greatly reduces the latency caused by optical-electrical conversions and congestion. It also achieves premium service access to computing within 1 ms.

In the construction of all-optical 10 Gbps and premium transmission networks, an intelligent management and control platform is critical. The platform digitalizes transmission network resources, such as bandwidth, latency, reliability, and energy consumption, to implement the integrated and optimal scheduling of computing power and transmission capabilities. For example, the platform can select an optimal path based on the bandwidth and latency requirements of services and corresponding network resources to implement fast service computing. Additionally, once the platform detects a network reliability risk, it notifies users of the risk promptly and provides optimization suggestions to ensure that the computing power is always on.

In terms of reliability, based on the multi-path protection of optical-electrical synergy ASON, the backup path is automatically restored, the network can withstand multiple fiber cuts, and each protection switching time is shorter than 50 ms. This ensures that network availability reaches 99.9999% and computing power is accessible as long as there is a path.

Intelligence will be ubiquitous in the next decade, and a solid network foundation is required to support it. Based on the F5.5G 10 Gbps optical network and premium transmission network, 99.9999% availability ensures that computing power is always on, 1 ms latency ensures that computing power is instantly accessible, and ubiquitous 10 Gbps access makes computing power accessible everywhere, enabling all intelligence in various industries.