GITEX GLOBAL 2024 | Bob Chen from Huawei: Embracing Three Trends in Optical Business to Amplify Industrial Intelligence

On October 14, 2024, during GITEX GLOBAL 2024 in Dubai, Bob Chen, President of Huawei Optical Business Product Line, delivered a keynote speech titled "Embracing Three Trends in Optical Business to Amplify Industrial Intelligence" at Global Optical Summit (GOS). He shared the latest trends of the optical industry, progress, and Huawei's innovative solutions in the intelligent era. During his talk, he called on Middle East, Central Asian, African, and global enterprise customers and partners to embrace three new trends: "Fiber-in Copper-out", "fgOTN-in SDH-out", and "Optical-sensing-in Hard-work-out". This article follows the highlights of his speech.

October 15, 2024

7 Min Read
Global network
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On October 14, 2024, during GITEX GLOBAL 2024 in Dubai, Bob Chen, President of Huawei Optical Business Product Line, delivered a keynote speech titled "Embracing Three Trends in Optical Business to Amplify Industrial Intelligence" at Global Optical Summit (GOS). He shared the latest trends of the optical industry, progress, and Huawei's innovative solutions in the intelligent era. During his talk, he called on Middle East, Central Asian, African, and global enterprise customers and partners to embrace three new trends: "Fiber-in Copper-out", "fgOTN-in SDH-out", and "Optical-sensing-in Hard-work-out". This article follows the highlights of his speech.

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Figure: Bob Chen delivering a keynote speech

The next decade will be an intelligent one. AI terminals are gradually maturing. AI foundation models are continuously iterating, and their multi-modal and real-time interaction have made a huge leap forward. This has made AI applications more popular. In the intelligent era, industries like electric power, transportation, healthcare, and education actively embrace AI and speed up intelligent transformation. All countries in the Middle East are actively promoting the use of AI.

In 2023, Huawei released an industrial intelligence reference architecture. In this architecture, sensing is the prerequisite for data collection. The network is a foundation for mass data transmission. The computing base and platform are the key to providing robust computing power and easy-to-use tools.

The optical industry focuses on intelligent connectivity and sensing. For intelligent connectivity, homes and campuses are evolving from gigabit to 10G, and optical fibers will replace copper cables. This trend has been dubbed "Fiber-in Copper-out". Moreover, on the production networks of industries like electric power and transportation, SDH is evolving to fgOTN at an increasing pace, which is called "fgOTN-in SDH-out". For intelligent sensing, in scenarios such as oil and gas pipeline inspection and perimeter inspection, manual onsite operations will be replaced by remote operations, and converged sensing such as vision and fiber sensing will be required. This trend is called "Optical-sensing-in Hard-work-out".

Fiber-in Copper-out at Home: ISPs Monetize Coverage, Bandwidth, and Experience, Accelerating Business Growth

Bob Chen noted that for fiber broadband in different regions around the world, ISPs can monetize coverage, bandwidth, and experience to achieve business success.

The first step is to monetize coverage. In areas where fiber coverage is insufficient, ISPs need to speed up fiber broadband construction to seize demographic dividends. Huawei's Nano OLTs can be installed in mini outdoor cabinets or corridors to move fiber access points closer to users, which is suitable for less populated residential areas like villages and can greatly reduce network construction costs. Our Trouble Free ONT can automatically optimize Wi-Fi quality to achieve self-service O&M using an App, shortening the ROI period to 2.5 years.

The second is to monetize bandwidth. In areas with 100 Mbps broadband, packages need to be upgraded from 100 Mbps to Gbps, to improve the ARPU per user. So far, more than 450 carriers have released gigabit or higher packages worldwide. 10G PON and Wi-Fi 6 or Wi-Fi 7 optical terminals are upgraded to provide users with premium gigabit home broadband, increasing revenue.

The last is to monetize experience. 50G PON and FTTR are required to provide premium ultra-gigabit experiences. Huawei has delivered more than 20 million sets of FTTR worldwide, and the average ARPU of carriers has increased by 40%. In addition, ISPs need to actively develop FTTR B2B services to achieve business growth.

Fiber-in Copper-out at Campuses: FTTO Accelerates Commercial Use

Now, "Fiber-in Copper-out" is moving from homes to campuses. Since Huawei released the industry's first FTTO solution, FTTO has become widely popularized. In China, more than 10 industry and organization standards have been released, including for general construction, education, healthcare, and manufacturing. In addition, nine provinces and cities have started to prepare regional passive all-optical standards. Outside China, 11 countries, including Saudi Arabia and Oman, have started to develop their own standards. In addition, FTTO is more and more commercially used. So far, it is used in over 9000 campuses globally, such as University of Canada in Egypt and Creek Harbour, Dubai. Huawei FTTO 2.0 solution supports 12.5G/25G to rooms, improving bandwidth by 25%. With its hard-isolation slicing, one network can carry many services like production and office, reducing the TCO by 30%.

fgOTN-in SDH-out at Industry Communications Networks: Large-Scale Commercial Use of fgOTN

As a hard pipe isolation technology, SDH has ensured production security in industries such as electric power and transportation for more than 30 years. Amid digital and intelligent upgrade, traditional SDH technology faces challenges regarding bandwidth and legacy devices. Therefore, ITU-T released the fgOTN standard at the end of last year. It clearly defines fgOTN as the next-generation standard technology that inherits SDH. This year, ITU-T continued to improve the standards and specifications of fgOTN features, including protection and clock synchronization. In addition, many industries have invested in the reconstruction of legacy SDH networks. Each year, 21,000 SDH devices are upgraded in industries like electric power and oil & gas worldwide. In terms of solutions, Huawei launched the industry's first optical transmission product that supports the fgOTN standard at the beginning of this year. The product has been verified by China Electric Power Research Institute as well as State Grid Shandong. It is fit to carry various electric power services.

fgOTN-in SDH-out at Data Centers: Helping Improve the Scale and Efficiency of Intelligent Computing Training

Intelligent computing training is scaling up from 10,000 cards to 100,000 cards, and in some cases even millions of cards. If the training scale is greater than 4000 cards, traditional pure switch networking will face challenges in scalability. Each time the intelligent computing scale is expanded, the data center network needs to be reconstructed, which is costly and time-consuming. Moreover, a large number of optical modules are prone to failures. According to statistics, in a 10,000-card cluster, training is interrupted around 60 times every year due to optical module failures. Additionally, the average port rate of computing cards doubles every two years, making it difficult for data center networks to evolve smoothly.

Huawei has launched the industry's first commercial all-optical switch solution for data centers. This solution provides ultra-dense ports and ultra-low power consumption, supporting on-demand expansion from 1000 to 1 million cards. It does not require any optical modules, which greatly reduces the failure rate. We also use port-level optical switching, which can evolve from 400G to 1.6T, or even higher.

Optical-sensing-in Hard-work-out: Small-Scale Perimeter Inspection and Fiber Sensing Solutions Benefit More Scenarios

Many industry scenarios, such as oil and gas pipeline inspection, perimeter inspection, and road traffic law enforcement, still require manual onsite operations, which often comes with poor working conditions and low operation efficiency. In the intelligent era, optical fiber, vision, and radar can sense information from multiple dimensions. AI can be used for more accurate intelligent remote operations, enabling employees to move from outdoor sites to offices. This helps create a more comfortable working environment and improve employee productivity.

Huawei's intelligent fiber sensing solution has been applied to more than 80 cases, such as oil and gas pipeline inspection, buried optical cable inspection, and perimeter inspection. For example, the intelligent railway perimeter inspection solution jointly developed by PRASA and Huawei improves the railway perimeter inspection efficiency by 50% and reduces theft incidents by 80%. Huawei has extended inspection capabilities of oil and gas pipelines to the inspection of buried optical cables so as to implement proactive warning of optical cable damage events, achieving the industry's highest alarm accuracy of 95%. In this way, the solution provides more intelligent protection measures for customers with important communication optical cables, such as ISPs, carriers, and governments. In addition, Huawei has extended the perimeter inspection capability of optical fiber sensing to small-scale scenarios such as substations, oil and gas stations, and data centers. With zero false negatives and 90% fewer false positives, the solution is more suitable for small-scale campuses.

At the end of his speech, Bob Chen referred to the Arabic saying, "The wind does not blow in the direction of the sailboats." It means that only by keeping abreast of trends can we secure success in the future. Huawei calls on all industry customers and partners to join us in seizing new "3 In 3 Out" opportunities to achieve win-win results in the intelligent era.

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