Paving the way for innovative applications, all-optical networks are moving from enterprises to ordinary people's homes

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From dial-up to ADSL, and then to fiber-to-the-home, in just over 20 years, home Internet speeds have grown from 56Kbps to today's highest gigabit broadband. We have personally experienced the rapid development of network speeds. As Internet speeds increase, our use of the Internet has become more diverse. From only being able to read text to reading pictures and text, to being able to listen to music, watch videos, and play games, now even watching 4K videos and playing cloud games are no problem.

Gigabit broadband is becoming more popular

These changes have also made the Internet economy take off. Future innovative applications must be based on faster Internet speeds. In other words, faster Internet speeds will once again bring about earth-shaking changes in our lives, work and entertainment. According to the data released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the fiber-to-home rate in my country has reached more than 90%, but after fiber-to-home access, 76% of users said that they could not reach the speed contracted by the operator.

The main reason for this situation is that the quality of network cables in the home varies greatly. The failure rate of network cables sold on the market is close to 30%, and the loss caused by the network cables makes the user's Internet experience poor. If the optical fiber entering the home is extended to every room in the home, the above problems can be solved. Because the optical fiber signal is stable and corrosion-resistant, the service life can be up to 30 years, and the reserved bandwidth is up to 10Gbps or more, the industry believes that optical fiber will be the new medium for indoor network coverage in the future.

With the rapid development of the Internet and video industry, 4K/8K ultra-high-definition video, cloud VR, online education, online office, video live broadcast and other services have become increasingly popular, and users have put forward higher and higher requirements for the quality of home networks. For example, online education requires a symmetrical network bandwidth of 30Mbps~100Mbps, and cloud VR services require a high bandwidth of more than 130Mbps. For large apartments and villas, the frequent freezes of video and game services and poor user experience caused by insufficient WiFi bandwidth and poor coverage have become the main pain points for large apartments. Therefore, how to bring gigabit broadband into the house and achieve the promised gigabit WiFi coverage for the whole house is a major challenge facing operators.

Starting from 2020, the three major operators and Huawei have cooperated to launch the FTTR all-optical home network innovative solution. Compared with the traditional FTTH fiber-to-the-home, this solution mainly consists of the FTTR main gateway, the home ODN network and the edge gateway deployed to each room, creatively realizing that the fiber reaches every room, the main gateway and the edge gateway both enable dual-band WiFi signals, and achieve gigabit WiFi coverage throughout the house, truly realizing the promised bandwidth experience in each room.

Schematic diagram of a fully optical home

The all-optical home solution has the following four highlights:

(1) Full Gigabit Broadband to Every Room: Fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) is used to connect all rooms, achieving dual Gigabit for both wired and WiFi. Traditional network cables are often as slow as 100 Mbps due to age, branching, and distance. Fiber far exceeds network cables in terms of speed, anti-interference, and distance, breaking through bandwidth bottlenecks. WiFi 6 signals are fully covered throughout the house, effectively alleviating the problem of signal weakening and rate drop caused by Wi-Fi passing through walls, achieving dual Gigabit for wired and WiFi.

(2) Global seamless roaming: The all-optical network is deployed in 1-to-N mode. Each room is equipped with a Huawei Starlight optical modem and router all-in-one device to provide WiFi6 wireless access. It also adopts an innovative intelligent seamless roaming protocol and multi-gateway collaboration to achieve millisecond-level automatic switching. The WiFi signal follows wherever the moving WiFi device goes.

(3) Zero lag for all services: Intelligent anti-interference technology can identify 18 interference sources and 100% identify and avoid interference channels, allowing high-value services to avoid congested channels. This truly enables zero lag for high-value services such as cloud VR, online office, e-sports, online education, and live video streaming anytime, anywhere.

(4) Whole-house customization service: Senior engineers of Mobile Smart Home who have professional technical certifications and rich experience in fiber-optic broadband and intelligent networking will provide on-site FTTR full-optical network surveys, customized network design and services based on the user's specific house type. Through intelligent operation and maintenance, the full-optical network can be visualized, managed and maintained, and the user's network problems can be discovered in time and proactively resolved, allowing users to enjoy the rich and colorful smart information life applications brought by wired broadband and WiFi gigabit speeds.

The network speed has been significantly improved

Especially for medium-sized and large-sized apartments, villas, and duplexes, fiber coverage in every room, and deployment of WiFi 6 gateways in the room, can allow high-speed WiFi to cover every room in the user's home, completely solving the poor WiFi Internet experience. Moreover, fiber optics can support the evolution of higher-speed broadband in the future, and there is no need to replace network cables during renovation. Currently, operators, network manufacturers, and real estate developers are working together to directly build full-network homes for newly built houses, thereby improving the Internet experience of home users and laying a network foundation for new applications.