Huawei's Three Innovations Help Carriers Build F5.5G All-Optical Intelligent Access Networks to Seize New Opportunities in the Intelligent Era

[Paris, France, October 9, 2024] During Broadband World Forum (BBWF) 2024, Feng Zhishan, President of Huawei Optical Access Domain, delivered a keynote speech titled " F5.5G Booming, Moving Towards an Intelligent World" at the All-Optical Access Innovation Forum. He pointed out that the rapid emergence of AI applications drives the optical broadband industry to evolve to gigabit/10Giga intelligent access networks, and that now is the time to develop F5.5G all-optical intelligent access networks. Huawei proposes to build an all-optical intelligent access network that features deterministic experience, gigabit/10Giga access, and computing-network integration. This solution accelerates the popularization of gigabit and the commercial use of 50G PON for 10Gbps, promotes the innovation of intelligent applications, and helps carriers seize new opportunities in the 10Gbps optical network era. All of this further propels us towards an intelligent world.

Amid the wide use of various AI applications like AI mobile phones, AI PCs, and AI foundation models, the optical broadband industry is evolving from 100M to ultra-gigabit, and has posed three new requirements: increasing bandwidth from 100M to 1Gbps+, improving experience from best-effort to deterministic, and changing the network architecture to device-cloud synergy. The all-optical access industry has also seen explosive growth. ETSI has officially released F5.5G, further enriching the application scenarios of all-optical access networks. The number of global gigabit users has reached 200 million, and that of FTTR users has exceeded 27 million. In addition, 15 countries and regions in the world have released policies on 10G optical network construction and development. Besides this, 50 leading carriers have started commercial deployment of 50G PON. All of this demonstrates that the global F5.5G all-optical access industry continues to flourish.

"The intelligent era requires higher-quality networks," noted Feng Zhishan. "The industry should accelerate the upgrade to F5.5G all-optical intelligent networks to seize the opportunities of intelligent service growth." Against this backdrop, Huawei launched three innovations to help carriers build all-optical intelligent access networks for accelerating the innovation of intelligent applications.

First, Huawei launched the industry's first 16-port 50G PON service board, which is fully compatible with the existing ODN network. The innovative Flex-50G PON solution achieves 10Gbps readiness in all scenarios. It provides the industry's highest-density 16-port 50G PON service board, enabling full compatibility with ODN networks. It also uses innovative tapered amplifiers and a superlattice structure, and supports 32 dB optical power budget, ensuring zero ODN changes. With optical path folding and spatial multiplexing, the three-mode six-wave board can smoothly replace the existing 16-port GPON and 10G PON boards. In addition, dedicated slicing channels can be built for ONTs, OLTs, and carrier clouds to provide SLA-committed deterministic experience for high-value cloud migration and computing services.

Second, Huawei upgraded the FTTR+X smart home hub. A built-in distributed intelligent computing engine is used to build a smart home optical connection hub. The innovative FTTR distributed intelligent computing engine implements on-demand computing power expansion and provides users with functions such as AI + all-optical home storage, AI + intelligent application acceleration, and AI + intelligent O&M, helping to build an optical connection hub for smart homes. Huawei also launched the industry's first 50G PON FTTR product, which supports 5Gbps concurrent Wi-Fi rate as well as 10Gbps to the room, improving the network-wide rate by 70% and helping carriers build 10G smart homes.

Third, Huawei innovated premium broadband O&M. It launched the industry's first home broadband intelligent model — Agent — accelerating the evolution to L4 autonomous driving networks. AI-enabled premium broadband greatly simplifies O&M and provides application-level high-quality experience assurance for all-optical intelligent access networks. Network-wide user experience can be accurately measured based on Huawei's unique experience awareness and scoring algorithms. Agent, Huawei's innovative home broadband intelligent model, can automatically analyze poor QoE of low-score users, and implement minute-level fault diagnosis, automatic onsite fault locating, and proactive poor-QoE rectification. This enables carriers to implement intelligent home broadband O&M and accelerate the evolution to L4 autonomous driving network.

To embrace new opportunities in the AI era, Huawei will work with carriers and industry chain partners to build an AI-ready F5.5G all-optical intelligent access network, explore business models for monetization based on differentiated dimensions, and seize home and enterprise AI markets.