China Mobile Beijing Builds L3 Autonomous Home Wi-Fi Networks with iMaster NCE

With people’s increasing expectations on home broadband services and the increase in the devices connecting to home networks, Wi-Fi is central to the Internet experience. In China’s capital city, most home broadband users access the Internet via ONT Wi-Fi on China Mobile Beijing. As a result, the operator is positioning Wi-Fi as a basic feature home network infrastructure

However, multiple factors affecting Internet access experience on Wi-Fi. Internet experience is actually a very complicated Wi-Fi networking problem – and something that users tend not to be able to solve themselves.

If we look at a 200 Mbps bandwidth package, the following factors may affect Internet access experience on the home network:

1. The ONT Wi-Fi is used, but the ONT is not a dual-band device and uses the 2.4-GHz frequency band.
2. The network port of the connected wired device is an FE port instead of a GE port.
3. The network cable is a CAT-5 cable or the cable is divided to support both IPTV and Internet access.
4. The router is a single-band device and the Wi-Fi speed rate cannot reach 200 Mbps.
5. In Wi-Fi relay mode, the relay pass-through wall causes rate loss.
6. The terminal does not support Wi-Fi 5/6 or Wi-Fi 5 reception performance cannot reach 200 Mbps.
7. No mesh exists between ONTs and routers, users can’t get good Wi-Fi experience (like seamless roaming, mesh networking, and channel optimization).
8. If more than 16 devices are connected.

Wi-Fi is an open frequency band and interference has a significant impact on services. The test result shows that when the Wi-Fi interference is greater than 35%, the Internet service is affected and when the interference is greater than 60%, the service experience deteriorates severely.

To identify and resolve the problems and improve user experience, China Mobile Beijing has built an autonomous home network solution based on the Huawei iMaster NCE premium broadband platform. Big data technology is used to analyze ONT Wi-Fi interference and signal coverage data; construct home network bandwidth, Wi-Fi; and application experience standards, and measure home network quality. Functions such as Wi-Fi dual-band combination and channel optimization can then be used to remotely optimize and close faults.

A list of users experiencing poor QoE is provided to guide the maintenance team to contact them and improve user experience on the home network.

iMaster NCE premium broadband platform manages 800,000 ONTs from dozens of different vendors. By leveraging this platform, call center personnel can solve Wi-Fi faults remotely and field engineers can easily identify who’s suffering a poor QoE, which the O&M team can rectify through Wi-Fi configuration.

Huawei iMaster NCE provides complete closed-loop capabilities from home Wi-Fi network awareness, analysis, decision, and execution. It achieves Level-3 network auto-driving capability, improving home Wi-Fi experience by 20%.

China Mobile Beijing

China Mobile BeiJing and Huawei have achieved good results in the exploration of autonomous home network. We will continue to innovate to help China Mobile Beijing improve broadband Internet access quality and achieve business success.

Chu Tao, President, NCE Optical Network, Huawei

Source: TM Forum / Evaluation Criteria for Automatic Driving Capability

Click the link for more information about the Huawei iMaster NCE.

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.