Huawei and its partners announced a global industry initiative toward Fifth Generation Fixed Network (F5G) at the 17th Huawei Global Analyst Summit (HAS) in China.
European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), China Broadband Development Alliance, Altice Portugal, and Huawei are part of the the industry initiative.

The new organization is inviting global fixed network industry players, both upstream and downstream companies, to join the F5G industry organization, to drive development in the industry.

F5G will expand Fiber to the Home to Fiber to the Enterprise, creating more F5G service scenarios. With a comprehensive F5G industry ecosystem, F5G will help the market grow and open up a new era for the global optical industry.

On February 25, ETSI released the ISG F5G, which aims at studying the fixed-network evolution through defining improvements with respect to previous solutions and the new characteristics of the fifth-generation fixed network to turn the Fiber to the Home paradigm into Fiber to Everything Everywhere.

“We would like to invite all the peers to join this ETSI ISG F5G initiative and to contribute, fostering the improvement of individuals’ and society’s life that fiber technology can offer in F5G era,” Luca Pesando, chairman of ETSI’s Industry Specification Group F5G (ISG F5G), said.

It is essential for the industry to focus on F5G to formulate unified specifications covering three basic application scenarios: transport, access, and customer premises networks. “This can reduce unnecessary fragmented private specifications and achieve economies of scale in the optical industry,” Wei Leping, deputy director of Communication Technology Steering Committee, MIIT & Chairman of Technology Steering Committee at China Telecom, said.

China is heading into the F5G era, and 100M fiber broadband has become popular. The number of gigabit broadband users had reached 1.97 million in Feb 2020.

“China is accelerating F5G application innovations to boost the digital economy, acting as a reference for other countries,” Ao Li, director of the Technology and Standards Research Institute at the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) and Deputy Secretary-General of the China Broadband Development Alliance, said.

Altice Portugal is in the forefront of the strategic transformation towards Very High Capacity Networks (VHCN) in Europe.

“There are a lot of challenges for us ahead and with ETSI F5G ISG we are working on a new framework to support the next generation of fixed networks by enabling new services and fiber to everything and everywhere,,” Luis Alveirinho, CTO of Altice Portugal, said.