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Macau, a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China, is perhaps best known as the “Las Vegas of Asia” with its many casinos hugely popular with tourists coming from all over the world.
What maybe is less recognised is that Macau boasts nearly a 100% full-fibre penetration rate (made more achievable, admittedly, by its comparatively small size of 33km squared) and that the SAR is at the vanguard of adopting F5.5G technologies, including fiber-to-the-room (FTTR) and 50G PON. F5.5G tech has a roadmap capable of supporting the ‘10Giga’ era as compared with the ‘Giga’ experiences found in F5G.
Leading the F5.5G charge in Macau is CTM (Companhia de Telecomunicações de Macau), which currently provides fibre broadband services to around 97% of the SAR’s some 210,00 households using GPON (1Gbps symmetrical packages available). The operator plans to expand its current nascent rollout of XGS-PON (theoretical symmetrical speeds of up to 10Gbps), continue its push on FTTR, and then make 50G PON commercially available in parts of Macau during the first quarter of 2025. CTM shuttered its copper-based broadband products in mid-2023.
“One of the main drivers of evolving the fibre broadband network is ARPU [average revenue per user] uplift,” Hudson Lou, CTM’s Director of Network Services and Development, told Light Reading at the recent Network X event held in Paris. Lou says that the ‘10Gbps’ plan on XGS-PON generates three times as much ARPU as the 1Gpbs service on GPON. This is despite the caveat that CTM can pledge asymmetric downstream speeds of more than 8Gbps with XGS-PON – through careful dimensioning – as it’s a shared medium. The FTTR average income uplift compared with GPON, adds Lou, is xx%.
FTTR attractions
CTM has so far signed up 3,000 households to its residential FTTR service, which uses fiber as ‘backhaul’, since it was launched in February 2023. Lou says FTTR is a significant performance enhancement when compared to Wi-Fi mesh technology, and markets the product as “Fibre 360” service.
“Some of our customers demand a very high-quality service, wanting a stable gigabyte experience everywhere inside their household apartment,” explains Lou. “They also want a seamless Wi-Fi experience as they move around from room to room. Stable connectivity is key, and was the main initial driver for FTTR, but we’re developing the service further.”
As well as deploying Huawei’s FTTR routers, CTM is now making use of the supplier’s ‘eAI’ solution, which can prioritise apps with AI capability in a so-called ‘priority tunnel’ of Wi-Fi RF data channels.
On the back of Huawei’s eAI, CTM recently launched a new ‘game plan’ dubbed ‘GameOnTheGo’ with the aim of assuring service performance. It’s an FTTR add-on that customers have to pay extra. “We not only want to provide stable connectivity but also introduce advanced and smart applications that can improve ARPU,” explains Lou.
To help keep FTTR O&M costs in check, CTM has adopted Huawei’s iMaster NCE-FAN solution. “It helps us to monitor and visualize the customers’ experience remotely and enable back-end staff to solve problems efficiently, which aims at reducing the number of field visits,” says Lou.
Huawei’s O&M solution also improves levels of customer satisfaction. Lou reports that as a proportion of the FTTR subscriber base compared with that of GPON, the iMaster NCE-FAN has efficiently improved customer enquiries or complaints.
Moving forward CTM will offer Wi-Fi 7 routers for its FTTR service, combining it with either XGS-PON and 50G PON to provide ‘10Giga’ packages for each room – and perhaps even speedier offerings than that, suggest Lou, with the advent of 50G PON.
On the road to 50G PON and OTN upgrades
CTM first publicly demonstrated 50G PON capabilities at a Macau technology exhibition “Beyond Expo” in April this year. Since then, it has been using the equipment (supplied by Huawei) for trials and internal use and is on track for commercial launch early next year. 50G PON will allow a full-blown symmetrical 10Gbps service plan without any of the 10Giga performance caveats attached to XGS-PON.
Lou sees lots of 50G PON take-up potential in the ToB (to business) segment, with applications like cloud NAS (network-attached storage), cloud phone and cloud PC expected to be popular. In the residential market, CTM thinks ‘mobile home’ (a converged fixed and mobile service) and gaming will be big 50G PON draws.
Enabling deterministic low latency to enable the likes of gaming will usually require a reshaping of the metro network in bigger countries to allow ‘one-hop’ connections, but this is less of a pressing requirement in Macau given its small size. Lou is nonetheless keenly aware of the need to upgrade CTM’s core optical transport network from 100G to 400G backbone and map out a future pathway to 800G and 1.2TB with supplier partners.
“Fixed broadband traffic volumes, spurred on by generative AI content, are set to increase 19% annually in Macau between 2025 and 2029,” he says.
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