Every reporter: Liu Ling Every editor: Tang Hui
In the spring of 2021, the Gigabit Optical Network (F5G) “fires.”
The two sessions this year, the “14th Five-Year Plan” and the 2035 long-term goal outline have clearly put forward the “promotion and upgrading of gigabit optical fiber networks.” The “Gigabit Optical Network” was written into the government work report for the first time, and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology also issued a specific construction action plan. For a time, the industry’s attention to the gigabit optical network reached a new height.
Recently, Huawei’s “2021 Global Analyst Conference” was held in Shenzhen. At the sub-forum “Intelligent All-Optical Network: Accelerating Gigabit Optical Network Construction”, Guangxi Telecom General Manager Ye Songhua said, “The construction of a Gigabit optical network can only be done by waiting. Cars, cars can’t wait for the road”. In his view, Gigabit optical network is the “bearing base” of communication infrastructures such as 5G, data centers, and the Internet of Things, and needs to be deployed in advance.
In addition to the “construction landing” of the gigabit optical network, exploring “application scenarios” is also a big problem. In this regard, Jin Yuzhi, president of Huawei’s transmission and access product line, revealed that Huawei plans to implement at least 100 Gigabit optical network application projects in the next five years, focusing on five areas of education, environment, health, development, and production.
Why accelerate the construction of gigabit optical network?
When it comes to 5G, everyone is no stranger; when it comes to F5G, few people know. 5G is a mobile communication network technology that focuses on wireless and mainly serves the access of mobile terminals such as mobile phones. And F5G is a fixed communication network technology, the focus is on wired, also known as “Gigabit Optical Network”, the main business is fixed network optical fiber broadband access.
Compared with the application scenarios, 5G is suitable for mobility and multi-connection scenarios, such as drones, car networking, etc.; F5G is suitable for fixedness, large bandwidth, low latency and high security scenarios, such as industrial Internet, data center Interconnection and enterprise parks, etc.
Like the fifth-generation mobile network technology represented by 5G, F5G has undergone more than 40 years of evolution, namely the F1G, F2G, F3G, and F4G eras. The corresponding era is the voice era, network era, video era, and 4K era. . In this “history of evolution”, different application scenarios have appeared in each era, and the work and life of each era have undergone tremendous changes.
Under the “Broadband China” strategy in the past, my country implemented the first “optical reform” characterized by “optical advancement in copper retreat”. In this cycle, our FTTH (Fiber to the Home Capability) penetration rate has reached 93%. Today, the “second optical reform” kicks off, and the past 100M optical network is being upgraded to a gigabit optical network.
Why upgrade to a gigabit optical network? According to iiMedia Consulting’s data, the number of online education users in China will exceed 300 million in 2020, and the symmetrical upstream and downstream bandwidth requirements for online courses are not less than 100Mbps, which needs to match the operator’s 500Mbps broadband package; remote office in China The scale of enterprises currently exceeds 18 million, and the smooth HD conference experience requires that the network packet loss rate is at least less than 1%.
Online education concept map image source: phototu.com
With the explosion of the cloud economy and thousands of industries shouting for digital transformation, it is imminent to upgrade the existing fixed network with a large bandwidth, low latency, high reliability, and simple deployment of all-optical networks.
In the “Dual Gigabit Network Coordinated Development Action Plan (2021-2023)” issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology a few days ago, it was proposed that by the end of 2023, the Gigabit optical fiber network will have the capacity to cover 400 million households. Broadband users exceeded 30 million, and 100 gigabit cities were built.
The government work report was written for the first time, and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued a specific construction action plan. The “Gigabit Optical Network” has now entered the fast lane of development. Zhang Haiyi, deputy director of the Institute of Technology and Standards of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, said at the forum that my country’s gigabit optical network construction is in a “climbing period” and the principle of “moderate advancement” needs to be considered, and 10G PON, OTN and other digital bases should be accelerated. Network capacity building.
In this context, Guangxi, Shandong, Shenzhen and other places have begun to increase the construction of gigabit optical networks, and some of them have put forward clear construction goals. Ye Songhua said that in the next three years, Guangxi Telecom plans to build 14 cities into “Gigabit Cities” to strengthen the coordinated development of Gigabit optical networks and 5G; Li Zhuangzhi, technical director of Shandong Unicom’s Network Department, also revealed that Shandong Unicom will be Fully open the integration of cloud and light to explore, and combine the needs and characteristics of government affairs, finance, medical, manufacturing and other industries to provide industry solutions.
Construction and landing require the efforts of all parties
In fact, it is not simple to promote the construction of gigabit optical networks in an all-round way.
Jin Yuzhi said that the “secondary reform” put forward two new requirements. First, it is necessary to realize Gigabit home access on the home side, including further upgrading from FTTH to FTTR (Fiber into the room), home Wi-Fi speed to realize Gigabit and so on. Second, on the industry application side, Gigabit optical networks should be used to collaborate with 5G to promote the digital transformation of thousands of industries.
The first is FTTR, which connects optical fibers to every room. Huang Zhiyong, vice president of Huawei’s transmission and access product line, told reporters that neither the twisted pair technology nor the power line technology can carry gigabit bandwidth. “The carrier of the power line is hundreds of megabytes and the bandwidth is limited, so fiber optics must be deployed. In the future, gigabit, two gigabit or more bandwidths may be needed. The advantage of fiber optics is that the bandwidth is unlimited and it has a life span of 30 years after deployment. ”
However, Huang Zhiyong mentioned that in the past, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development did not have a clear standard for putting optical fiber into the room. Therefore, Huawei is now cooperating with the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, hoping to bury optical fibers directly in the rooms in commercial office buildings and residential communities. “The FTTR road requires not only policy support, but also the cooperation of upstream and downstream companies including home improvement companies, operators, Huawei, and real estate developers.”
According to the data, from the perspective of the development of gigabit broadband access services, as of 2020, 70 provincial telecom operators in China have launched gigabit broadband commercial packages; the number of gigabit subscribers in my country has reached 6.43 million, which is higher than that. At the end of the year, there was a net increase of 5.53 million households.
However, “speeding up and reducing fees” is also the focus that the government has always mentioned. Last year’s government work report clearly put forward the requirement of “a 15% reduction in average rates for broadband and dedicated lines”, and this year’s government work report also clearly required that SMEs’ average broadband and dedicated line tariffs be reduced by another 10%.
Under the trend of “speed up and cost reduction”, how can operators and equipment manufacturers make profits? Huang Zhiyong told reporters, “Huawei’s idea is to reduce the transmission cost per bit through a large number of technological innovations on the one hand. On the other hand, to make network construction more efficient through a large number of scenario-based and architectural innovations. One point of view is to’improve quality and speed’, and ultimately transform the previously mentioned demographic dividend into an experience dividend by satisfying the differentiated experience of customers.”
While major operators are investing heavily in the construction of 5G, they must also promote the upgrade of gigabit optical networks. Therefore, in addition to the implementation of gigabit optical network construction and tariff issues, the investment cost of F5G construction is also the focus of attention from the outside world.
Huang Zhiyong said that the investment in the F5G era from F4G, GPON to 10GPON did not increase much, because the most difficult money to spend in the “optical in and copper retreat 1.0” was to unplug the copper wires and deploy optical fibers in the GPON era. The 100M F4G era 80% of the cost has been invested. Therefore, when upgrading from 100M to Gigabit, 80% of the investment does not need to be moved. Only the OLT board and Gigabit optical modem of the central office are upgraded. The F5G Gigabit access investment may be 1/10 or even less than that of 5G.
Exploring “application scenarios” is the key
The wave of 5G is rolling forward, and the current 5G-oriented application exploration for the B-side is also a hot spot. Industry convergence applications are accelerating, while the application exploration of Gigabit optical networks is relatively small compared to 5G. In the development of gigabit optical network, the foundation is under construction and the key is in use. How to promote the innovative application of gigabit optical network is the focus of attention of all parties at present.
Wei Leping, executive deputy director of the Communication Science and Technology Committee of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, once said that Gigabit optical network access is not only a supplement to Gigabit 5G access, but even better than 5G in many performance parameters. 5G applicable business scenarios include outdoor mobile scenarios and scenarios where optical fiber is difficult to deploy. The advantages of optical fiber are the coverage of fixed scenarios such as homes, offices, workshops, medical care, and video surveillance, as well as scenarios with high-bandwidth and high-quality networks.
Fixed scene is the dominant area of optical fiber. Source: Photograph.com
However, the current level of my country’s optical fiber network and 5G network has led the world, and it has entered a “no man’s land” in terms of “dual gigabit” network applications, and is in the stage of concentrated exploration and research.
Jin Yuzhi said that scenarios such as education informatization, medical digitization, and industrial Internet are all application scenarios for Gigabit optical networks: in universities, teaching and life scenarios are responsible, and the number of users is huge; hospitals also face problems such as large amounts of data and high transmission pressure, and In telemedicine, low latency and so on are required.
At the forum, Zhu Suishong, director of the Network Technology Department of Shenzhen Nanshan People’s Hospital, shared the innovative application of “all-optical network” in smart medical care. Zhu Suisong said that after the hospital adopted the “All Optical Park” solution, the network was stable and reliable, and the access time of the medical imaging system was increased from nearly 20 seconds to less than 1 second. At the same time, based on this network, the medical record sharing referral of 89 social health clinics and 5 general hospitals of Xiehe Shenzhen Hospital has been realized.
According to him, an ordinary CT light film is very difficult to understand for most patients, but a complete set of three-dimensional medical images can effectively make patients aware of their condition, but such three-dimensional images require three hundred Only one CT light film can be composed. The blessing of the gigabit optical network has greatly increased the speed of the hospital’s access to the medical imaging system, making it possible to construct more three-dimensional medical images.
In fact, Huawei has been exploring the application scenarios of gigabit optical networks. Huang Zhiyong told reporters, “In to B scenarios, such as mines, in fact, F5G is particularly needed. Because there are many tree-shaped roadways in the mines, it is very difficult to transmit wireless signals in the roadways, and there are flammable and explosive scenes under the coal mine. F5G has a large bandwidth and time The extension is low, and technology based on industrial PON or optical is not possible, which can greatly reduce the number of explosion-proof boxes.”
Huang Zhiyong also mentioned that in some strong electric manufacturing scenes, such as automobile processing and some welding igniting scenes, the charged ones are not as good as the anti-interference effect of optical fiber, which is also suitable for F5G scenes. It is understood that in order to explore more application scenarios, Huawei will launch the “Light Chaser 100” action plan, focusing on education, environment, health, development, production and other 5 areas in the next 5 years, and implement at least 100 gigabit optical networks. Application project.
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