5G bearer technologies have their own advantages, but optical fiber transmission is still a mystery

Recently, China Telecom released the "5G Era Optical Transport Network Technology White Paper". In terms of technology, 5G has put forward three major business requirements, massive bandwidth (1G-10G bandwidth), three times the spectrum efficiency, latency as low as 1ms, and a huge number of connections.

It is reported that China Mobile will formulate the 5G bearer enterprise standard SPN this year. As early as the ITU-T SG15 meeting in June this year, China Mobile, together with China Telecom, China Unicom, China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, ZTE, FiberHome and other units, submitted 5G transmission network requirements document (C157) and many other 5G transmission related documents, which received strong responses from experts attending the meeting. This is the first time in the industry that the basic framework of the 5G transmission network has been systematically proposed, laying the foundation for the research of global standards for 5G transmission.

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It is understood that China Unicom's mixed-ownership reform plan will invest more than 20 billion yuan in the early construction of 5G, which will greatly speed up the commercialization process of 5G.

In addition, on August 14 this year, Huawei officially released the 5G-oriented mobile bearer solution X-Haul, which has four core values: flexible access in all scenarios to match different site scenarios; agile operation based on cloud architecture; enabling new business innovation through end-to-end network slicing; and supporting the smooth evolution of 4G bearer network to 5G bearer. It fully supports operators' 5G business expansion and helps operators build end-to-end 5G networks.

For 5G bearer, ZTE provides 5G bearer solutions evolved from Ethernet and OTN technologies based on the operators' existing network conditions and different demands. ZTE has achieved phased results in 5G bearer technology solutions and was the first to release the 5G bearer solution 5G Flexhaul.

5G will further increase the demand for optical fiber and cable

According to the Economic Operation of the Communications Industry from January to August released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the number of fiber-optic access users increased by 44.09 million in August. The total number of fiber-optic access (FTTH/O) users reached 272 million, a net increase of 44.09 million from the end of last year. Judging from previous data, fiber-optic access has been on a straight-line upward trend. Nevertheless, from a general trend, the demand for fiber optic cables driven by 5G will definitely exceed FTTH/O.

With the advent of 5G, how to lay out the 5G bearer transmission network has also attracted great attention from operators and equipment manufacturers. The optical communication industry has also fallen into deep thought. Running 5G high-bandwidth transmission on the basis of existing optical fiber transmission has great defects. So what kind of optical fiber can meet future needs is the current issue they are concerned about.

It is reported that, unlike the chimney-type and star-shaped distributed access network architecture of the traditional 3G and 4G era, the 5G fronthaul network architecture will make full use of network virtualization, wireless cloudification, and mobile edge computing technologies, and save site resources and improve the efficiency of air interface resource utilization through centralized deployment, making the value of the fronthaul network prominent, thus greatly increasing the demand for optical fiber and cable. At the same time, it also puts forward higher requirements for optical fiber.

Wei Leping, director of the Science and Technology Committee of China Telecom Group, once analyzed that the ultra-large bandwidth and ultra-high speed in the new requirements of 5G networks for bearer are closely related to the optical communication industry. The user peak rate of the bearer network needs to be increased by 20 times. Due to the use of large-scale antennas, the fronthaul bandwidth requirement is hundreds of Gbit/s. Whether it is the technology, fronthaul and backhaul capacity and cost challenges faced by optical communications, they all need in-depth research for the optical communication industry. So far, optical communication manufacturers have not developed a specific optical fiber cable for 5G transmission. Relying on my country's strong R&D team and technical capabilities, I believe that new products are just around the corner.