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On the heels of the innovation roadmap announced on “Lighting up the 5.5G Era” in July this year, Huawei, at the recently held UBBF 2022, announced major innovations in driving the industry toward Net 5.5G and F5.5G.

At UBBF 2022, Kevin Hu, President of Huawei Data Communication Product Line, delivered a keynote speech entitled “Stride to Net5.5G, Boost New Growth,” highlighting the requirements for Net5.5G evolution raised by carriers’ growing B2B services and basic transport networks. He also introduced key technological innovations for Net5.5G evolution.

Citing a recent whitepaper from OMDIA, Kevin Hu detailed how enterprise digital transformation will further drive carriers’ business growth in the Net5.5G era and how carriers can extend service capabilities based on leased lines to significantly expand their B2B revenue streams

“To facilitate the development of 5.5G, F5.5G, and carriers’ B2B services, and to help carriers expand service boundaries and gain new business growth, we should accelerate business scenario innovation and consolidate innovative technologies for the Net5.5G Era,” Kevin Hu said.

Some of the Net5.5 innovations highlighted at the event are the following:

Leased Line + Premium: provides agile, premium, and flexible connections for enterprises to move to the cloud. Solutions such as agile leased lines, slice-based leased lines, and tenant-level private networks help carriers expand their commercial offerings of leased line services. In the future, quality capabilities will be continuously improved in terms of deterministic low jitter, APN6, and million-level path computation.

Leased Line + Security Management Service: provides online on-demand subscription of security services and scenario-specific one-stop security solutions to safeguard the digital transformation of industries. Security protection provides automatic closed-loop protection, with an automatic threat handling rate of 99% and an unknown ransomware detection rate of over 95%.

Leased Line + LAN/Wi-Fi Managed Service: extends carriers’ DICT capabilities from WANs to LANs to meet enterprise requirements, implementing cloud-managed network services with WAN-LAN convergence. In the future, Wi-Fi 6 will evolve to Wi-Fi 7 with a peak air interface rate of 30 Gbit/s to provide full wireless access coverage for enterprise campus networks.

Leased Line + SD-WAN: provides enterprises with fast cloud access experience through SD-WAN. Large-scale networking of more than 20000 branches and continuous service experience optimization will become the future evolution direction.

Carriers’ business combination of “leased line + X” need to meet a wide range of requirements, such as fast deployment, flexible multi-cloud connection, quality assurance, and tenant-level scheduling. This will accelerate the upgrade of transport networks’ basic capabilities in terms of protocols, deterministic quality, automation, and intelligence, Kevin Hu said.

Technologies such as E2E SRv6, slicing, full-lifecycle automation, telemetry, and digital map can be used to build a basic transport network that features multi-cloud and multi-computing collaboration, committed SLA, multi-dimensional visualization, and predictable O&M.

Immersive applications — which are high-hungry and feature real-time interaction — require 10 times more bandwidth. In order to meet end users’ requirements for 10 Gbps everywhere experience, carriers should deliver E2E ultra-broadband capabilities with 50GE to base station, 100GE to BNG, and 800GE to core.

To meet the new challenges arising from multiple data centre management, AI computing capabilities and full-lifecycle automation, Huawei suggests all-Ethernet converged architecture, 800GE interconnection, and L4 ADN capabilities. This helps to ensure service experience in various scenarios and fully unlock the new computing power in the intelligent era.

At UBBF, Jin Yuzhi, President of Optical Business Product Line, Huawei, emphasized the role of fibre on the road to F5.5G. In his keynote, “Unleash the Potential of Fibre, Stride to F5.5G,” Yuzhi said Huawei has made significant strides in this regard by focusing on 10 Gbps everywhere, all-optical switching, industrial applications, and the integration of communication and sensing.

Jin Yuzhi urged operators and industry partners to join in F5.5G innovation, to jointly improve capabilities and seize opportunities in the digital wave.

Globally fibre deployment is moving from FTTH to FTTR (Fibre to the Room) at 10Gbps, to improve the Wi-Fi experience at home, including speed, roaming and concurrency. Enterprises are deploying high-quality private lines thanks to OXC and OTN. Enterprise campuses are enjoying higher bandwidth across the WiFi network. Fibre is also getting extended to the machine, yielding microsecond-level latency and six-nine reliable optical connections for industrial manufacturing. Countries are accelerating the fiber construction. A few examples are the projects like EU VHCN, Thailand Giga Thailand, and Germany Giga Strategy 2030.

With 10Gbps becoming ubiquitous, all-optical switching is replacing electrical switching. This opens new market opportunities across telecom, industrial applications, communication and sensing integration, Jin Yuzhi said.

Jin Yuzhi also highlighted the major milestones in the road to F5.5G evolution. In 2020, ETSI released the F5G standard with three key features: eFBB, FFC, and GRE. In April this year, at F5G Evolution Summit hosted by Informa, Huawei proposed F5.5G. Also, last year, ITU published 50G-PON as the next-generation standard of 10G-PON.

To be compatible with G-PON and 10G-PON on the existing networks, Huawei is working on several innovations. First, the Taper amplifier and high sensitivity receiver provide 40 km coverage, which is the same as G-PON and 10G-PON. Second, photonic integration makes the compact 50G PON 3-mode combo module available. These two components allow operators to reuse the existing ODN and smoothly upgrade the network to 50G-PON.

The Super C+L, an important milestone in WDM evolution, helps increase WDM system capacity through increasing the rate and extending the spectrum. Super C+L is achieved by adding new doping elements and increasing the doping concentration, leading to 50% wider spectrum. By combining 400G/800G with Super C+L, they can achieve 100Tbps capacity in a single-fiber.

Another innovation, the Huawei OptiX Alps-WDM is an “Agile, Long-term evolution, Pooling, Simplified Architecture” for Metro WDMs. It provides 10 times higher bandwidths, reduces footprint by 10-fold, supports 10 years evolution and 20% Opex saving.  According to Yuzhi, Huawei OptiX Alps-WDM is the “best TCO-effective metro solution.”

Huawei’s innovations in OXCs also enable green all-optical networks. The 3D lattice algorithm helps improve the fiber density of the optical backplane by 35%. One sheet of A4 paper can print 1000 fibers. Compared to conventional ROADM, OXC could save 90% space, reduce power consumption by 60%. Also, by adding new materials in LCoS, Liquid crystal’s response time is reduced from 200ms to 100ms. It makes wavelength switching and protection faster.

Other technologies like OSU and C-WAN are also gaining popularity. OSU, the next-generation OTN technology, reduces latency by 70% through protocol simplification. It supports hitless bandwidth adjustment from 2 Mbps to 100 Gbps and provide 100 times of high-quality private line connections to enterprises. ITU-T has completed the initiation of the G.OSU standard.  The C-WAN architecture is emerging as the prime component in the transition from FTTH to FTTR, to ensure ultimate gigabit home broadband experience.

Another major upgrade in the path to F5.5G is the Fiber Iris, an innovation applied to ODN to help manage ODN resources. Fiber Iris labels each port, ensuring 100% resource accuracy, improving TTM, and protecting investment without any ports wasted.

Lastly Yuzhi also underscored the importance of ADN upgrade and said Huawei has made significant strides in ADN evolution. StellarGo and StellarCue are two important innovations in ADN. StellarGo provides multi-factor path computation for optical private lines. With this, computation success rate reaches 99%, and the service provisioning efficiency can be improved by 70%. StellarCue is applied in the home broadband scenario. It enables one-minute perception of user application experience. StellarCue could assist operator reduce customer complaints and ensure user experience. ADN continuously innovates in improving operation efficiency and customer experience, boost the business success. He added that upgrading ADN from L3 to L4 could help suppress OPEX growth.