MWC24: Inspiring New Growth for Carriers with Net5.5G

Immersive terminals and AI applications have seen explosive growth, bringing huge opportunities to carriers.

In the consumer market, immersive terminals are developing rapidly. And according to DSCC, XR shipments will surge, which in turn will bring new requirement to networks.

Take the latest-generation MR terminal as an example. It supports:

• 8K VOD
• 9-channel video calls
• 3D modeling of faces and environments
• A peak bandwidth of 800 Mbps

With AAA games currently requiring 20-ms latency.he single terminal has entered the Gigabit era where higher bandwidth and lower latency can directly bring a better experience.

In the enterprise market, innovation in AI is faster than we previously imagined possible. Gartner predicts that by 2026, more than 80% of enterprises will adopt AIGC. In the video production field, Open AI recently released Sora, allowing videos to be generated based on simple statements. Each video generation requires about 8 to 10 interactions, which will increase network traffic more than tenfold.

In the autonomous driving training field, a large amount of self-driving training data needs to be transmitted. For example, some enterprises generate around 160 TB data every day, which needs to be uploaded to the computing center for model training.

Thus, agile, flexible, and inclusive access to networks has become a main requirement in the AI era.

Current carrier networks carriers do not meet the requirements of new services. Personal bandwidth is insufficient. According to Huawei's survey, the download rate of most of today's networks in the world is less than 100 Mbps, and the percentage of 10GE access rings is less than 15%.

Services such as XR are becoming more popular than ever, but today‘s network bandwidth cannot meet the surge in traffic.

For enterprises, the current private line bandwidth is not flexible enough. Large bandwidth is expensive, while low bandwidth is not enough. Currently, the monthly cost of 10GE private lines exceeds US$10,000, and the bandwidth of 90% enterprise private lines is less than 1 Gbps. Moreover, traditional private lines cannot be flexibly adjusted based on service requirements.

In the AI era, when enterprises generate massive data and need to transmit data to computing centers. However, their traditional private lines lack the capability.

Due to this, the industry agrees that networks need to continuously evolve to meet the changing requirements of terminals and applications. The fixed network oriented to the 5.5G era is called Net5.5G. The Net5.5G target network includes four parts.

The first part is four types of 10-Gbps connections to support new applications:

• 10-Gbps mobile broadband
• 10-Gbps home broadband
• 10-Gbps enterprise campus
• 10-Gbps enterprise private line

The second part is for the bearer networks, which need to evolve to end-to-end 400GE converged transport network for faster network monetization. The next part is for data centers, where upgrading to 400GE or 800GE ports is a must to provide more efficient computing power.

The last part is network management. We can use the network digital map to manage, optimize and analyze the whole network.

Net5.5G full series of solutions and products will help carriers seize the new opportunities of four types 10GE services:

• mobile broadband
• enterprise broadband
• enterprise campus
• enterprise private lines

They be enabled to build target networks with ubiquitous 10-Gbps connections, elastic ultra-broadband transport, and autonomous network self-optimization. These features can inspire new growth for carriers.

In the mobile backhaul field, with the evolution from 5G to 5.5G, the bandwidth of base stations are upgraded from 10GE to 25GE/50GE, while the access layer is upgraded from 10GE to 100GE.

Huawei’s Net5.5G mobile backhaul solution provides the most comprehensive access capabilities with 25GE to 400GE on demand. It is compatible with 4G, 5G, and 5.5G, ensuring smooth evolution and protecting investments. The latest 1U and 3U base station routers lead the industry in terms of capacity and power consumption, achieving optimal TCO.

As we know, user experience affects end users' choice. For example, network packet loss often occurs in South Africa. As a result, the video bit rate decreases and user experience declines. As a result, carriers lose revenue. In the past, they manually adjusted the links, but the effect was difficult to control. After they deployed the network digital map, service paths and quality are optimized in real time. After optimization, suppressed traffic of 2,000 base stations is released, increasing DOU and carriers’ revenues.

At Huawei, we provide a unique optimization capability for application-level experience to ensure the best mobile experience.

Many fixed carriers have a large number of enterprise users. Based on this market, they can develop enterprise digital managed services to support transformation from ISP to MSP.

Carriers can provide differentiated services from three aspects.

First, the Wi-Fi 7 market is becoming more and more mature. More chips and terminals support Wi-Fi 7, and with the advantages of Wi-Fi 7, carriers can provide a better wireless experience for enterprises. To support this, Huawei provides all-scenario Wi-Fi 7 products, which greatly improve bandwidth and user concurrency compared with WiFi 6E in the industry.

Second, Wi-Fi 7 can provide 30 channels of 4K video access without freezing. Lossless multi-GE switches and hyper-converged gateways ensure no freezing for audio and video.

Third, the cloud platform-based LAN and WAN convergence solution greatly simplifies O&M.

We have already cooperated with carriers on high-quality 10GE campus networks. An example is the leading carriers In the Middle East whose typical customers are SMEs with about 30 employees. With the cloud management service, the average monthly rental of private lines has increased by 17%.

Huawei’s cloud management platform is used to centrally and remotely manage multiple tenants, reducing OPEX by 30%. This platform also supports fast campus network deployment and the one-click batch deployment of multiple branch networks. WAN and LAN services can be provisioned at a single site within 10 minutes, improving service provisioning efficiency.

In transport networks, due to traffic growth and network construction investment pressure, carriers see 400GE and network convergence as the first choice for network construction. For example, a leading carrier in Europe built a converged IP Metro and Core network over a lengthy timeframe and started to deploy 400GE for increasing traffic, optimizing TCO.

Huawei's 400GE converged transport network solution provides the most powerful 400GE full-service capability from metro to core. It is fully advanced in terms of full-service convergence, port density, and service overlay performance.

Moreover, after network convergence, the most important thing is network monetization for more revenue. In the B2B market especially, carriers can improve their competitive advantages and avoid strong competition. China's leading carriers have started to provide private network-level service assurance services for industry customers.

Many carriers use hybrid networks from multiple vendors, which makes it difficult to deploy end-to-end slicing. Huawei's unique software and hardware dual-mode slicing solution can interconnect with other vendors and manage third-party devices, greatly helping carriers to deploy slice-based private lines.

In addition to private lines, many industry customers have private network requirements. For example, an education authority in China required a private education network to develop new services such as online education and electronic proctoring. Industry customers have great pressure of investment to build their own networks and hope to get network services from carriers. In this case, carriers build a dedicated smart education network that provides network-wide service visibility. And ROI is less than three years.

In data center networks, we believe that computing power leasing services is a strong trend for carriers. Besides IDC equipment rooms and servers, operators also can provide computing power leasing services. In fact, some leading carriers have started to build large-scale computing power centers and provide computing power leasing services, with an ROI less than 2.5 years.

Huawei provides the hyper-converged data center network solution to help carriers quickly build large-scale computing power centers. This solution offers many unique benefits.

The first benefit is the plug-and-play function, which improves efficiency tenfold compared with conventional methods.

The second benefit is our industry-leading NSLB algorithm. This algorithm can increase network throughput from 50% to 98% and improve the AI model training efficiency by 20%.

The third benefit is unified O&M through the network digital map. It enables minute-level fault location on the compute and storage network, reduces waiting time for computing power and protects customers' investment.

Open Ethernet protocols are another benefit. They help implement unified deployment and O&M, reducing customer investment by 30%. Huawei's hyper-converged data center network releases 100% computing power, helping carriers quickly implement cloud-based computing power leasing.

We have launched a full series of Net5.5G solutions and products and expect these offerings to help  carriers achieve new growth in home broadband, mobile broadband, and enterprise private line and enterprise campus services.

Let‘s work together to bring Net5.5G into reality and inspire new growth.

Learn more about Huawei’s fixed network solutions.

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.