A thorough investigation of the history behind Huawei's high-quality Wi-Fi ONTs

[51CTO.com original article] Only after careful carving can a tool be made, and only after repeated tempering can steel be made. A piece of uncut jade needs to be carefully carved to become a tool; a piece of iron needs to be tempered at high temperature many times to remove impurities and become high-hardness steel, which never stops. As an extremely responsible manufacturer, Huawei has always treated its products like uncut jade and diamond, constantly carving and tempering them, and only after they are launched on the market.

In April this year, Huawei's SmartWi-Fi tri-band access terminal (AP) won two top global industrial design awards, Red Dot and IF, for its architectural design that highly integrates appearance and functions, its minimalist form design that integrates with the home environment, and its simple and user-friendly experience design.

Not long ago, 51CTO reporters had the honor of visiting the birthplace of this product - the Access Network Wi-Fi Design and Testing Center of Huawei Wuhan Research Institute, and witnessed the rigorous process of Huawei's high-quality home Wi-Fi optical modems from research and development to delivery. What exactly do these products go through? Let's follow the reporter's pen to learn more.

A look inside the Huawei Wuhan Research Institute’s access network Wi-Fi design and testing center

It is reported that the Wi-Fi Design and Test Center of Huawei Wuhan Research Institute covers an area of ​​more than 2,300 square meters, with an investment of more than 20 million RMB and a team of more than 100 engineers and experts, and has designed and provided home access terminal products, including DSL gateways and ONTs, for more than 150 operators around the world. The center has the industry's top Wi-Fi design laboratory and team, a variety of simulations of demanding home Wi-Fi verification scenarios, antenna darkrooms, microwave darkrooms, and EMC darkrooms.

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On the day of the visit, under the guidance of Zeng Huarong, ONT director of Huawei's access network product line home network field, the reporters first entered the environmental reliability laboratory, which covers high and low temperature service tests, aging tests, and temperature limit tests. According to reports, the conventional temperature chamber can accommodate 300 complete machines for environmental reliability testing at the same time. The double 85 temperature chamber can achieve long-term high temperature (85°) and high humidity (85%) testing of single boards for 30 days, and can accommodate 400pcs of single boards for device selection testing at the same time. The aging room has a total of 16 cat cars, which can accommodate 1,600 complete machines for long-term aging tests. Environmental reliability laboratory tests can cover different regional environmental climate usage scenarios around the world. Large-volume testing covers a large number of shipped products, and any existing network failures can be quickly reproduced in the laboratory. It meets the European IEC 60068 reliability test standard to provide users with the safest, most stable and most reliable terminal products.

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The second stop of the tour was the antenna laboratory, also known as the antenna design darkroom, which mainly tests the coverage and directional performance of Wi-Fi. Antenna design is crucial to Wi-Fi coverage. If home users want to get a consistent Wi-Fi connection experience in different areas, home access terminal products must have 360-degree coverage without dead angles, which depends on the antenna design of the access terminal product and its own software algorithm, chip and RF performance.

In this lab, Huawei outputs a digital model of antenna coverage. Through this test and the output model, the coverage capability of the antenna at various angles can be understood. Engineers can correct and adjust the antenna angle design based on the report, optimize the algorithm, and ensure users' 360-degree omnidirectional Wi-Fi experience.

Next, following Zeng Huarong's footsteps, we entered the Wi-Fi anti-interference laboratory. This laboratory mainly simulates various interference signals, such as those generated by microwave ovens, Bluetooth devices, cordless phones, and neighbor Wi-Fi cat cars in the home. Among these interference signals, the ability of Huawei's Wi-Fi access terminal equipment to resist interference is verified. By increasing signal isolation in hardware, actively sensing interference in software, dynamically adjusting channels, and automatically optimizing dual-frequency selection to avoid interference, it is like on a highway, some lanes are congested, and Huawei Wi-Fi can actively detect those congested sections, find the fastest lane, and always maintain the best speed.

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During the visit, a robot in the Wi-Fi anti-interference laboratory attracted everyone's attention. Zeng Huarong introduced that this is an automated Wi-Fi test robot. It performs distance testing through automated path planning and automatically uploads test data after the test is completed. If the battery is out, the robot can also go to the charging station to charge itself. The test robot solves the problems of incomplete manual testing and unsustainable manual testing. In an unmanned environment, it reduces human interference and ensures test consistency.

Afterwards, we visited the microwave darkroom laboratory. This laboratory is a shielded room mainly used to design and verify the Wi-Fi performance data of access terminal products at various distances and angles, covering directional testing, performance testing, and multi-user performance testing. We know that when there are multiple users in a home and multiple services are connected to Wi-Fi at the same time, there will most likely be "congestion". Just like a highway, the most congested part often occurs at the entrance, and Wi-Fi is the entrance. Huawei's multi-user multi-service test environment can simulate the ability of multiple devices and multiple services to use Wi-Fi at the same time. In this test environment, the performance and experience verification at various distances and angles are simulated, the performance capabilities of the product at various angles in the room are improved, the product Wi-Fi design is optimized, and the end-user experience of Huawei Wi-Fi is improved.

Finally, we visited Huawei's large-scale automated verification laboratory. According to reports, the laboratory has 150 sets of functional automated factory environments to fully verify basic Wi-Fi functions; 50 sets of stability automated environments to verify and protect Huawei Wi-Fi products 24/7; and 20 sets of automated performance environment verification equipment.

Using "craftsman spirit" to make high-quality home broadband, see how Huawei builds a better Wi-Fi experience for home users

Through this visit, the reporter deeply realized Huawei's "craftsman spirit" of focusing on technology and constantly polishing its products. So, after thousands of trials and tribulations, what are the products and solutions launched by Huawei Wuhan Research Institute like? After the visit, the reporter and his team had an in-depth exchange with experts from Huawei Wuhan Research Institute.

With the booming development of smart terminals and video services such as 4K and VR, home Wi-Fi networks need to support more terminal devices, and users have higher requirements for broadband performance, latency, and other capabilities. However, due to the current dense building design and diversified apartment types, home Wi-Fi signal conflicts are strong, coverage is poor, speed is low, and Wi-Fi fault location is difficult, which greatly reduces the home Wi-Fi experience. Users have a high Wi-Fi fault reporting rate, and operators often need to send engineers to troubleshoot on site, resulting in long troubleshooting time and high operation and maintenance costs.

"An operator in a certain part of the country has about 2 million home broadband users, and there are about 200,000 complaints about broadband each year, of which 64% have to be handled on-site, and the average time required is about 11 hours. The minimum on-site fee is 50 RMB, and the annual on-site cost is as high as hundreds of millions RMB," said Feng Zhishan, general manager of Huawei's access network product line home network field, giving an example.

In this context, in order to provide home users with a better Wi-Fi experience, Huawei has launched the SmartWi-Fi home network solution based on cloud-based operation and maintenance, based on its deep understanding of home broadband services, strong technical R&D capabilities, and extensive cooperation with operators. The solution is centered on high-performance home gateways, providing a series of AP product packages to flexibly extend Wi-Fi signals to meet the needs of home high-speed Wi-Fi in various scenarios of various apartment types. It can flexibly network with multiple media to extend high-speed Wi-Fi signals to every corner, achieving indoor Wi-Fi signal coverage without blind spots, and supporting cloud-based remote operation and maintenance through cloud management modules, reducing door-to-door visits and reducing OPEX by more than 30%. It can also realize Wi-Fi quantitative evaluation and deployment and intelligent networking through APP. It can also realize Wi-Fi quality difference identification and active optimization through big data analysis.

Taking Guangdong Telecom as an example, through the home network cloud management platform of this solution, Guangdong Telecom has achieved remote positioning and troubleshooting, reduced door-to-door service by 30%, reduced operation and maintenance OPEX, and realized one-stop service for home network quality assessment, design deployment, and completion acceptance.

In addition, Feng Zhishan told reporters that Huawei's SmartWi-Fi solution can bring three major values ​​to operators:

The first value is to provide the best Wi-Fi performance for end users. Huawei's self-developed Wi-Fi chips are used to achieve performance optimization such as anti-interference and wide coverage. At the same time, a series of ONTs are provided to flexibly extend Wi-Fi signals to meet the needs of home high-speed Wi-Fi in various scenarios of various apartment types. Flexible networking of multiple media enables indoor Wi-Fi signal coverage without blind spots, thus providing the best Wi-Fi experience for end users.

It is worth mentioning that Wi-Fi chips are only part of Huawei's self-developed chips in the field of home networks. According to Zeng Huarong, Huawei's self-developed chips in the field of home networks are divided into three parts: First, the PON field. It has been nine years since the launch of the first generation of self-developed chips in 2010, from GPON, EPON to XGPON and XGS PON. In the future, the architecture of the main chip to the NP architecture will continue to be built and evolved. Second, the Wi-Fi field. Currently in commercial use is SD1151, which is Huawei's second-generation Wi-Fi chip. Wi-Fi chips will evolve towards new industry standards, such as 11AX's 2*2, 4*4, 8*8 MIMO, etc. Third, the IOT field. For example, chips based on power lines, the 5G terminal Balong series that has been released, etc. In the next 3 to 5 years, Huawei will gradually use chips in this field in home network products.

The second value is the best video experience. Through the air interface transmission optimization algorithm and other capabilities of the SmartWi-Fi solution, users can have the best video experience.

The third value is to provide operators with remote cloud-based home network management, which is visible, manageable, and maintainable. Visible means that operators can use the cloud management platform to see the complete topology of the home Wi-Fi network; manageable means that they can perform management operations such as Wi-Fi version upgrades, Wi-Fi problem information diagnosis and location; maintainable means that in response to user complaints, operators can use Huawei's cloud platform to perform big data analysis and remote fault location.

"The focus and core of Huawei's home network solution lies in six aspects: bandwidth performance, coverage, anti-interference, multi-user concurrency, ease of use, and visibility, manageability and maintainability. These six aspects are also the main line of Huawei's planning for self-developed chips." Finally, Feng Zhishan concluded that Huawei's SmartWi-Fi home network solution is the implementation of Huawei's "quality broadband" value proposition in the "last 10 meters", and is committed to effectively solving the key problems of the last 10 meters of ultra-wideband access, and to safeguard users' high-quality home network experience. Behind it are extreme industrial design, massive professional testing, strict quality control, strong innovation investment and the spirit of craftsmanship that strives for excellence.

[51CTO original article, please indicate the original author and source as 51CTO.com when reprinting on partner sites]