OptiX SuperSite: Lighting Up New Capabilities for FMC

Digital economies powered by the digital transformation of industry verticals are leading a wave of technological and industrial revolution on a global scale. In this digital world, home and enterprise users expect an outstanding experience. And to deliver this, a basic requirement is high-quality network connectivity. As enterprise and home services are major revenue drivers for operators, they need to be competitive in the enterprise and home broadband markets by providing premium private lines to SMEs and optimal E2E experience for home customers.

Huawei launched the OptiX SuperSite solution at MWC Shanghai 2021. The solution is the first in the industry to deploy optical transmission and access networks in the same site – in effect building a high-speed portal to the digital world.

Fixed Mobile Convergence

The fixed mobile convergence (FMC) concept came about in the mid-1990s, allowing users to enjoy the same services and applications in both fixed and mobile environments.

Operators can leverage FMC packages to boost sales, lower marketing costs, and increase user loyalty and average revenue per user (ARPU). According to Omdia, 49.8% of operators owned fixed and mobile assets by 2019.

Top operators, such as Vodafone and China Mobile, have invested heavily in FMC, which seeks to converge networks, services, management and support platforms, and operation and management modes — something that cannot be achieved overnight. On top of this, mobile operators face a number of challenges such as restricted equipment room space, insufficient fiber, and costly construction. One Asian-Pacific operator that aims to adapt to fixed services is unable to do so as 67% of its sites lack sufficient room to carry out such a transformation. This calls for a solution that saves space, cuts costs, and can be deployed outdoors.

Huawei OptiX SuperSite offers three modes to operators, depending on their requirements: outdoor, cabinet, or CO.

Outdoor deployment can help operators with FMC progress, save space and boost cost-effectiveness:

• Reusing existing optical cables and site resources to adapt to home broadband and private line scenarios.

Compact edge OTNs and Pizza OLTs are deployed in outdoor cabinets and can be mounted on walls or poles, or installed on the ground. This eases the burden on equipment room space and heat dissipation, thereby slashing site construction and reconstruction costs. Huawei’s innovative plug-and-play DQ-ODN solution can quickly cover high-value areas and users. The gray + colored transmission is innovatively used for backhaul. Gray light forwarded hop by hop from the live IP/SDH services can be carried on a single fiber with new home broadband and enterprise private-line services. This requires no additional optical fiber/cable and reduces the investment burden, because services can be added without changing the IP/SDH configurations on the live network. The subsequent ROI of a single site is shortened to 2–3 years. In short, mobile operators no longer need to worry about fiber resources or equipment room space.

• Intensive architecture design opens up multi-service quality transmission at lower costs.

With OTN technologies, the OptiX SuperSite solution can maximize fiber value to hundreds of Gbps in the upstream. This directly connects 5G, home broadband, and private line services to the OTN, granting them high-bandwidth all-optical grooming and one hop to the cloud in 1 ms. This supports high-quality video, premium 5G, and ultra-low latency private line services, empowering 2H, 2B, and 2C full-service transmission while cutting down overall network construction costs.

Edge OTNs adopt a simple design to achieve one board in one slot for one direction at the optical layer. In this way, one optical-layer board functions as five original boards. This cuts slot demand by 80% and requires fewer devices and optical-layer investments. The distributed OTN architecture is used at the electrical layer to access services of any granularity, greatly reducing grooming costs and power consumption, while also improving line bandwidth utilization by over 40%. All in all, optical-layer and electrical-layer innovations help operators cut FMC construction costs.

• Precise network construction and efficient investment are achieved.

Operators want to accurately plan FMC based on customer distribution, service traffic model, and customer demand, and require scalable FMC to support future evolution. The OptiX SuperSite solution integrates home broadband access and OTN backhaul, along with mixed deployment support in high-value areas, which means high-value customers are prioritized, and investment and coverage are expanded as services develop. Edge OTNs support the integrated optical-electrical platform. This means that in the early phase of FMC construction, electrical-layer boards are deployed in some traffic hotspots to access new services, such as home broadband and private line services; other sites only need to deploy platforms and optical layer to pass through new service wavelengths. OTN electrical-layer boards will be expanded and new services can be quickly backhauled. Optical-electrical integration as well as optical-layer deployment followed by on-demand electrical-layer expansion help operators cut investment costs, construct optimal networks, and operate efficiently.

FMC is inevitable thanks to its transformative technologies such as OptiX SuperSites. As high-value enterprise private lines have gained prominence over recent years, FMC is moving towards fixed mobile enterprise convergence (FMEC). Operators must continue to evolve their operations and management methods, and construct superior networks in order to remain competitive in an ever-changing market.

For more information, read Huawei’s OptiX SuperSite Empowers High-Speed Access into the Digital World.

Disclaimer: Any views and/or opinions expressed in this post by individual authors or contributors are their personal views and/or opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views and/or opinions of Huawei Technologies.