From building a green and intelligent campus in Thailand to helping deliver an optical backbone network solution in Singapore’s transportation industry, Huawei’s solutions based on F5G have started reshaping industry productivity.
In an interview with Telecom Review, vice president of Huawei Optical Business Product Line, Kim Jin, discussed how the company is spearheading the industry direction and its successful applications across a variety of industries to accelerate digital transformation.
F5G is defined as the fifth generation of fixed communications networks by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). It aims to promote and enable fiber to anything and anywhere in a wide range of industries.
This has been remarkably successful in enhanced fixed broadband (eFBB), full-fiber connection (FFC) and guaranteed reliable experience (GRE) scenarios based on optical fiber communication technologies.
Jin said, “Huawei has long-term technical expertise and practices in optics communication fields. And since ETSI established the industry standard group in February 2020, Huawei has been an important participant and promoter for F5G standards. Huawei has more than 6,000 cases in industries worldwide, and based on our index analysis of these cases in April this year, Huawei proposed an initiative of upgrading or evolving of F5G.
“Huawei sees F5G developing into three more application scenarios, namely, Green Agile Optical Network (GAO), Real-time Resilient Link (RRL) and Optical Sensing & Visualization (OSV). And it encourages partners within the industry chain to work together in promoting F5G innovation and application.
“Since Huawei rolled out solutions based on F5G, it has started to address the fast-changing technological needs of various industries. And it will also mainly develop across three new industry scenarios, and it will introduce the ICT sector’s first all-optical intelligent timing IoT gateway, as well as a brand-new optical fiber vibration sensing device.
“F5G actually is entering a wide range of industries and is accelerating digital transformation; meanwhile F5G also sets higher requirements for optical technologies. For example, in manufacturing, we need a high bandwidth, and in smart grids, they need high security, and [in terms of] carbon neutrality, it also needs a greener or more efficient energy.”
Five Solutions for Empowering Industrial Digitalization
Based on Huawei’s exploration in different scenarios, it has built the Green Intelligent OptiX network solutions for enterprises and five innovative scenario-based solutions — FTTO (Fiber To The Office), FTTM (Fiber To The Machine), Single OptiX, DC OptiX and Sensing OptiX — to ramp up industrial digitalization.
FTTO solution was created to set up green and simplified campus networks. This solution reduces the network architecture from three layers to two layers, ensuring no extra-low voltage (ELV) room is required. Its unique P2MP architecture also reduces the investment of optical modules by 50%. And because optical terminals support plug-and-play and swap-and-play, this also enhances O&M efficiency by 50%.
FTTM solution, meanwhile, leverages the advantages of the medium that is optical fiber. It applies to a broad range of scenarios such as factories, subways, coal mines, ports and highways, and provides deterministic low latency and high reliability, meeting the network requirements of industrial scenarios. Among many other scenarios, the FTTM network at ports delivers deterministic ultra-low latency so that operators can run machines remotely from 100 km away, streamlining container operation efficiency.
Another innovative scenario-based solution is the Single OptiX, which supports fifth-generation hard pipe technology dubbed as Optical Service Unit (OSU). Huawei also uses OSU in its solution in order to streamline the entire network and ensure the end-to-end physical isolation of services and high security. It can be applied in scenarios like power grids and transportation where high reliability and scalability are required.
Huawei has also come out with the Storage-Optical Connection Coordination solution, combining the advantages of storage and optical communications products. It provides strong protection capabilities for end-to-end DC services .
For example, based on the coordination between optical and storage products, it is capable of quickly detecting the link faults of the optical network and immediately completing the storage I/O link handover within 2 seconds.
Huawei also released a new optical sensing product, OptiXsense EF3000-F50. This new product allows operators to apply the optical sensing technologies from oil and gas pipeline inspection to protect key areas such as airports, railways and large campuses.
Jin said, “These solutions have been widely applied in different scenarios in a wide range of industries; we hope that we can leverage these solutions to accelerate the digital transformation.”
He added that this new technology can ensure low-carbon emission: “Based on the advantages of the medium itself, optical fiber is more energy-efficient than the traditional medium, so it provides highly efficient environmental protection and can be used in longer life cycles up to 20 to 30 years. And second, the manufacturing of optical fibers is also environmentally friendly because it has less carbon emissions.”
Progress Made in Various Industries
Huawei’s customers and partners from different countries in Asia Pacific have proven how these F5G practices have helped them with their industrial digitalization.
Among their notable projects, the DTGO Corporation from Thailand chose Huawei’s FTTO solution to build a green, efficient and intelligent O&M campus network to achieve energy conservation, intelligent security protection and value-adding smart campus, thus helping the Forestias community to improve the quality of life for residents and those living in surrounding communities.
Also in Thailand, electronic payment infrastructure provider, ITMX, uses Huawei’s FTTO solutions to build their data center interconnection network so that they can enjoy low latency at a millisecond level and also large bandwidth at the terabyte level, ensuring business continuity and disaster recovery. This allows them to build this highly efficient infrastructure for electronic payment in the country.
Another partner is Indonesia’s ISP provider, FiberStar, which provides network coverage across Indonesia. The company uses Huawei’s Single Optix solution to enjoy large bandwidth and build the backbone network in cities.
Huawei has also teamed up with Singapore’s telecom and enterprise solutions firm, ROOTS, which provides optical backbone network solutions for the country’s transportation industry. The company uses Huawei’s FTTO solution in the transportation and healthcare industries. ROOTS has also strengthened cooperation with Huawei in the all-optical campus field, among other industries.
As Jin said, “With Huawei’s solutions, we work together to achieve energy conservation, cost reduction, efficiency improvement and create the values of industries together. I believe, with the evolution of F5G, there will be more solutions customized for a wide range of industries.”