On April 20, 2023, Huawei hosted its yearly Global Analyst Summit, bringing together industry organizations, analysts, top operators, and enterprises to explore F5.5G industry development strategies and potential application scenarios. The “Embracing F5.5G to Lead 10Giga City with Innovation” forum honed in on the industry-wide agreement that the evolution from 1 Gbps to 10 Gbps is imperative and discussed ingenious approaches to accomplishing this goal.
Further, it’s not new that the demand for faster internet speeds has been rising, and organizations like ETSI and WBBA have been working to address this need by publishing reports and guidelines to foster the development of new technologies. ETSI released the F5G Advanced and Beyond White Paper in 2022 to equip direction for attaining higher-than-gigabit bandwidth connections, while WBBA published a roadmap for the development of next-generation broadband.
At the forum, Richard Jin, who serves as the President of Huawei’s Optical Business Product Line, provided insight into Huawei’s perspective on the evolution toward F5.5G. According to Jin, Huawei is focused on transitioning towards all-optical 10Giga cities in five preliminary areas: homes, enterprises, machines, computing, and sensing.
He furthermore emphasized the need for affiliation among industry players to establish standards, promote policies, foster technological innovation, and construct an ecosystem of applications that can assist us in collectively conceding this vision and usher in a new era of intelligent living.
Scenario 1 – Home
In the home scenario, new applications such as ultra-HD video, XR, metaverse, and cloud desktops need loftier bandwidth, lower latency, and higher reliability of home broadband. For instance, an 8K naked-eye 3D TV requires an access bandwidth of over 3 Gbps to implement H.264-compressed multi-view imaging.
Scenario 2 – Enterprise
To support smart campus applications like digital-assisted diagnosis and treatment, multi-camera live broadcasting of sports events, and holographic interactive design, the enterprise scenario necessitates an all-optical network with a bandwidth exceeding 1 Gbps and a network latency below 10 ms, with a goal of 10G.
Scenario 3 – Machine
The scenario about Machines foresees that forthcoming industrial production will necessitate a 10G all-optical production network that can facilitate an intelligent connection of all elements. The network must provide bandwidth in surplus of 10 Gbps, latency lesser than 1 ms, and jitter less than 20 μs for ultra-HD AOI quality assessment and production line PLC.
Scenario 4 – Computing
In the computing scenario, the network bandwidth between data centers and users increases rapidly, and the latency requirement becomes more stringent. To lower transmission power consumption and facilitate instant access to cloud computing power, a 10G network implements a simplified architecture consisting of a 400G backbone network, 100G metro access, and all-optical grooming.
Scenario 5 – Sensing
In the sensing scenario, optical fiber sensing capability helps fiber digitalization and precise fault location, attaining perceptible and manageable fiber networks and enriching network operation efficiency. The laser 3D optical sensing technology can furthermore dynamically monitor the aged for falls, helping protect their health based on home broadband access.
Moreover, industry experts called on all parties in the industry to continuously foster innovative services and experiences. Richard Mahony who is a member of WBBA as well as a VP of Informa Tech stated that WBBA expedites the timely emergence of next-generation broadband everywhere, offering a sustainable long-term ROI for all industries.
At the conference, Ao Li who is a Chief Engineer of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology emphasized the escalating momentum of the F5G-A era along with the prospect for 10G optical networks to function as a robust foundation for digital infrastructure across multifarious sectors. After that, in the end, the forum participants issued a call to action, urging the entire industry to come together and collaborate on standardization, policy promotion, technological innovation, and ecosystem development.
