Huawei F5G-A All-Optical target network drives digital economy growth in the region

The SAMENA ACCELERATOR on 10 Giga Digital Infrastructure was successfully held at the One&Only Royal Mirage, Dubai, attracting more than 150 industry professionals from the Middle East and Central Asia region to foster a consensus on F5G-A acceleration for a digitally empowered future.

At the summit, Huawei proposed accelerating the construction of F5G-A ‘All-Optical 10Gbps + Premium Transmission’ target network to support intelligent transformation and drive digital economy growth in the intelligent era.

In recent years, the optical industry has been growing rapidly all over the world. The number of gigabit users has exceeded 215 million, and more than 50 carriers have released 10 Gbps optical broadband packages. In addition, 400G optical backbone networks have been widely deployed in more than 100 countries or regions. Fiber networks play a critical role in the growth of digital economy and telecom business.

Kim Jin, Vice President of Huawei Optical Business Product Line, emphasised in his speech that there are still room to improve the fiber network coverage and gigabit broadband development in the region. For example, Saudi Arabia has released an FTTH policy to open up resources for optical fiber deployment, rapidly increasing FTTH coverage to 60% by 2022. Gigabit access is an important factor to improve the digital economy. Bahrain has released the “Post-Gigabit-Society” plan to bring gigabit access to every home and 10G coverage to every enterprise by 2026.

“The next 10 years are a decade of intelligence, Building F5G-A ‘All-Optical 10Gbps + Premium Transmission’ target network will accelerate 10Giga digital infrastructure in the Middle East and Central Asia, driving region’s digital economy development and embracing new opportunities together in intelligent era,” noted Jin.

Jin further elaborated that AI foundation models, terminals, and applications have become mature in 2024. The wide use of intelligent applications is driving traffic growth explosively and demanding deterministic low latency on networks. Meanwhile, the training of AI foundation and industry-specific models requires ultra-large-scale DCs, driving the evolution from centralised to multi-layer and distributed deployment, he added.

It is forecasted that data center interconnect (DCI) bandwidth in the Middle East will exceed 255 Tbps in three years. These service changes pose higher requirements on carriers’ backbone, metro, and access networks.

The F5G-A “All-Optical 10Gbps + Premium Transmission” target network consists of the following parts:

• 1 Gbps/10 Gbps Intelligent Access Network: ‘10G PON to Home’ enables smooth upgrade from 100 Mbps to 1000 Mbps for better experience. 50G PON Ready achieves 10 Gbps to all scenarios. FTTR provides ultra-gigabit Wi-Fi experience in every corner of a room and supports more innovative applications.
• One-Hop All-Optical Metro Network: A full-mesh network at the metro core layer is built to implement one-hop connection between DCs and achieve inter-DC high-speed interconnection within 1 ms. Furthermore, by deploying OTN to the network edge and using OXC to implement optical switching, an E2E all-optical switching network is built to achieve deterministic, low-latency, and premium transmission of intelligent services.
• 400G/800G 3D-Mesh Backbone Network: A 3D-mesh architecture is used to build an ultra-high-speed optical plane between hotspot DCs on the backbone network, ensuring non-blocking interconnections. In terms of bandwidth, as the industry chain matures, OTN has entered the new generation of 400G/800G. The 400G/800G rate replaces traditional 100G/200G, reducing the per-bit cost by more than 30% and bringing considerable benefits. In terms of reliability, Hybrid ASON protection ensures that a network can withstand multiple fiber cuts and each switching time is shorter than 50 ms, ensuring 99.9999% network reliability and automatic path availability between DCs.
• Intelligent management and control platform: AI is introduced to the management and control platform to realise automatic service provisioning, proactive user experience management, and proactive O&M, thereby improving user experience and efficiency, increasing revenue, and reducing the OPEX.

Huawei is committed to collaborating with industry partners to continuously innovate the F5G-A “All-Optical 10Gbps + Premium Transmission” target network and accelerate the construction of 10Giga digital infrastructure in the region, embracing new opportunities in intelligent era.