Huawei eyes up optical network opportunities

Hot on the heels of delivering its 2020 strategy for 5G technology, and aiming to upgrade its intelligent network strategy to enable premium experience in the 5G era, Huawei has launched what it says is the world’s first Liquid optical transport network (OTN) system.

Liquid OTN is designed to enable the convergence of transport and access networks with its end-to-end optical connectivity constructed to ensure ultra-high bandwidth and ultra-low latency. This is said to help operators and enterprises build networks with guaranteed good experience to achieve business success in home and enterprise scenarios.

Explaining the proposition at the Huawei products and solutions launch in London, Kevin Huang, vice-president and chief marketing officer of Huawei’s transmission and access network product line, said: “Network innovation is shifting from bandwidth-driven to experience-driven. Therefore, our innovation will focus on connectivity, bandwidth and latency to bring unparalleled experience for users and enable the business success of operators, enterprises, and industries.

“Huawei aims to build ubiquitous optical connections and lay a solid foundation to provide an outstanding experience for end users,” he added.

Said to be the industry’s first small-granularity OTN system, Liquid OTN adopts Huawei OptiXtrans products and has three key capabilities, which are ubiquitous all-optical connectivity, hitless bandwidth adjustment, and ultra-low transport latency.

Huawei sees Liquid OTN as acting as an engine for the optical transport networks from physical transport networks to service transmission networks, supporting operators, enterprises and industries in building experience-centric transmission networks.

Furthermore, Huawei attributed it with having the potential to promote the prosperity of the global optical network industry and achieve the balanced development of industry and business innovation.

Liquid OTN introduces OSUflex containers to support flexible bandwidth definition. Furthermore, network hard slices can achieve a fine granularity of 2 Mbit/s, improving the number of supported connections “by 500 times”. The system also supports hitless bandwidth adjustment from 2 Mbit/s to 100 Gbit/s, ensuring zero service interruption and full use of network resources.

It is also said to flatten significantly the network transport layers, providing differentiated latency levels and reducing per-site latency by 70% to reach the microsecond level, adapting to different delay-sensitive scenarios.

Also part of the new offers, Huawei has launched AirPON, which is said to be the industry’s first optical access system for fixed mobile convergence. The AirPON system comprises the blade OLT, the Digital QuickODN (DQ ODN) in Huawei’s OptiXaccess portfolios, and Huawei’s OptiXstar home terminals. It is designed to help mobile operators quickly develop high-quality gigabit fibre broadband services.

The system is said to have a number of advantages such as “0” site acquisition, using existing mobile stations to shorten the fibre access distance from 5km to less than 1km, significantly improving network construction efficiency and reducing the capital expenditure (capex) by 27%.

The AirPON system also supports end-to-end optical distribution network (ODN) visualisation to achieve accurate resource management and fault locating, as well as fast service provisioning, reducing the ODN sunk cost by 20%. DQ ODN-based end-to-end pre-connections improve the construction efficiency by 70%.

The third part of the optical offer is Huawei eAI ONT, which Huawei claims is the industry’s first optical network terminal (ONT) product with embedded artificial intelligence (AI) that can intelligently identify the service types.

Wi-Fi 6 slicing and intelligent power adjustment technologies are said to be able to halve the latency of some services, increasing the average revenue per user (ARPU) of home users. In addition, the product adopts the APM intelligent sleep mechanism, which Huawei says reduces the overall power consumption by 20% compared with other suppliers.