Huawei shares 3 optical industry trends at the Huawei Global Optical Summit

"Optical connectivity and sensing have been the cornerstones of intelligent industry transformation,” said Bob Chen as he delivered the opening speech of the first Global Optical Summit, part of the Huawei Digital and Intelligent APAC Congress 2024.

Chen, President of Huawei’s Optical Business Product Line, was speaking about how the tech leader’s enterprise optical network solutions were transforming multiple industry sectors by providing fibre-optic connections that enable ubiquitous optical connectivity.

With connections that extend from homes to rooms, from factories to machines, and from offices to desktops, optical fibre promises high-bandwidth, low-latency performance that cater to the growing demands of the public and private sectors as they undergo digital and intelligent transformation.

Governments around the world, as well as industries such as telecoms, energy, transportation, finance, education, healthcare, and manufacturing, all aim to deliver enhanced service experiences.

GovInsider earlier reported how a leading private university in Thailand had worked with Huawei to upgrade its network infrastructure to implement a smart campus to better cater to the needs of educators, staff and students.

In his speech, Chen highlighted three trends to watch, including how optical connectivity in a “campus” setting can future-proof network infrastructure of a university, a hospital, or a factory for decades to come.

1. Fibre in, copper out

As campus networks embrace Wi-Fi 7 technology, traditional copper lines will inevitably be replaced by fibre-optic cables, which enable higher bandwidth, offer longer service life – future-proofing for about 30 years – and are more environmentally friendly.

Targeting large campuses in industries such as education, healthcare, and manufacturing, Huawei has launched its fibre-to-the-office, or FTTO 2.0, solution to upgrade the bandwidth, networking, and operations and maintenance (O&M) on the live network.

Huawei made an innovative breakthrough with the industry’s first XGS-PON Pro technology, a passive optical network standard that supports ultra-high bandwidth access of 12.5G or 25G services. This was announced last year at the Huawei Connect conference.

The solution also supports end-to-end (E2E) hard slicing technology, which enables one network to carry multiple services fully isolated and without interference, reducing the total cost of ownership by 30 per cent.

Furthermore, the Network Cloud Engine (NCE) management platform implements a holistic management of IP and Passive Optical LAN networks, enabling a single view to manage an entire campus network via a unified platform.

Huawei has also launched the all-optical target network for ISPs in the “fibre to the room (FTTR)” era. On the access side, full-scenario home broadband solutions, such as FTTR and Trouble-Free Optical Network Terminal, are used to help ISPs improve user experience and reduce operating expenses.

On backbone and metropolitan area networks, Huawei’s industry-leading 400G Optical Transport Network (OTN) products and innovative OptiX Alps-WDM Solution enable ISPs to easily cope with rising traffic on the networks.

2. fgOTN in, SDH out

Over the past few decades, synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH) has been widely used on industry communication networks as a secure and reliable solution.

But as digital intelligence continues to ramp up in the industry, the bandwidth limit imposed by SDH has become a bottleneck, creating a need for a next-generation production communication network that supports higher bandwidth without sacrificing security and reliability.

SDH networks in the electric power and transportation industries are now being upgraded and reconstructed with fine-grain OTN, or fgOTN.

This comes after the International Telecommunication Union-Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) officially approved the fgOTN standard last December and defined it as a next-generation technology to replace SDH.

In February, Huawei launched the industry's first solution that supports the fgOTN standard to help build a solid and highly reliable communication network.

3. Optical sensing in, hard work out

Critical infrastructure such as railways, airports, and oil and gas pipelines often require perimeter inspection as part of manual on-site operations. The efficiency for such inspection often tends to be low, and with poor associated working conditions.

Smart perimeter inspection and monitoring solutions, across vast expanses such as for pipelines, can now be implemented, thanks to next-generation fibre-optic sensing and AI analysis.

These accurate and always-on solutions enable employers to redeploy staff from outdoor sites to offices, improving their productivity and conditions at work.

Another advantage of Huawei’s optical-visual linkage solution: it uses fibre-optic vibration and video detection to achieve zero false negatives. Based on the industry’s unique AI foundation model, the solution provides high anti-interference capabilities and achieves 90 per cent fewer false positives than the industry average.

It is yet another example of Huawei’s leadership position in the optical industry, as the firm continues exploring how to innovate optical technologies and products to enable industrial intelligence.