Huawei Green Intelligent OptiX Network, the Fifth Network for Smart Cities

With the digitization of city governance, cloud migration of various industries, and proliferation of digital life apps, a ubiquitous and efficient all-optical communications network has become indispensable for cities. Following on from the water, electricity, gas, and transportation networks, the communications network becomes the fifth core infrastructure network for smart cities, and is an important lifeline. In the future, smart cities will bring us many more surprises. Considering this, what kind of communications network do smart cities need? Huawei provides the green Intelligent OptiX solution to build an intelligent, simplified, ultra-broadband, and ubiquitous next-generation communications network that extends optical connections to communities, campuses, factories, homes, desktops, and machines. In this way, the solution accelerates city digitalization and brings ultimate experience to city operations.

Cities are becoming both digital and smart. The advancement of digital technologies and industries determines how smart cities can be, while an all-optical infrastructure network lays the foundation for cities to become smart.

More than 150 countries around the world have released fiber strategies or Internet initiatives, promising to make network infrastructure widely available to the public. Governments are providing tax preferences or subsidies to rapidly build backbone networks, expand network coverage, bridge the digital divide, and promote national economic development.

In Europe, the French government has launched the high-speed broadband plan THD to promote the deployment of fibers and public networks in rural areas, with the goal of providing 30 Mbps broadband for all French people by the end of 2022. Spain's Smart All-Optical Spain plan achieved 100% coverage of 300 Mbps in 2021. Germany is providing subsidies worth tens of billions of euros for fiber construction to achieve full gigabit coverage by 2025. In Africa, Nigeria has launched the National Broadband Plan (2019-2022) to build a digital infrastructure network. Meanwhile, Egypt is implementing the Digital Egypt Builders Initiative (DEBI) to build a national fiber network to promote Egypt's digital transformation.

Green Intelligent OptiX Network, Building an All-Optical Foundation for Smart Cities

Full-scenario awareness, interconnection, and intelligence are becoming the goals of the next-generation smart city development. To achieve these goals, the cloud and network become the key infrastructures for smart cites. As a digital bridge between terminals and the cloud, a reliable network plays a pivotal role in ensuring service security and rapid provisioning of new services. Fiber connections are now widely used in industries such as education, healthcare, government services, transportation, and electric power, facilitating our daily lives and work while making cities smarter. City governments need to pay close attention to network construction, as well as use effective management measures and technological tools to ensure data security and cope with diverse services.

As cities strive to become smart, their top priority becomes building an intelligent all-optical network as the foundation for connectivity. In 2019, Huawei officially launched the Intelligent OptiX Network strategy to bring ultimate service experience to every person, home, and organization. The strategy aims to build an intelligent, simplified, ultra-broadband, and ubiquitous next-generation all-optical network that reaches the network edge. During Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2022, Huawei released the green Intelligent OptiX solution for governments and enterprises. The solution integrates five innovative scenario-based solutions — FTTO(Fiber to the Office), FTTM(Fiber to the Machine), Single OptiX, DC OptiX, and Sensing OptiX — to enable digital transformation of various industries.

• FTTO

By replacing active devices with passive devices, the solution reduces the network architecture from three layers to two, and eliminates the need for extra-low voltage (ELV) rooms. In this solution, an innovative point-to-multipoint architecture reduces the investment in optical modules by 50%, and terminals are plug-and-play and hot swappable, improving O&M efficiency by 50%.

• FTTM

Featuring deterministic low latency and high reliability, the solution meets industrial-level network requirements, and can be widely used for factories, workshops, electric power, subways, coal mines, ports, and highways.

• Single OptiX

Featuring native hard pipes (NHPs), the solution integrates the transport and access networks, and uses the optical switch units (OSU) technology to streamline the entire network, ensuring E2E physical isolation of services and high security. This solution is applicable to electric power and transportation industries.

• DC OptiX

Through storage-optical connection coordination (SOCC), the solution can quickly detect optical link faults and implement link failover in 5 ms. In addition, SOCC can monitor fiber link jitter in real time and proactively notify storage devices of the jitter. In this way, I/O channel switchover is shortened from 120 seconds to 2 seconds, ensuring zero data loss and greatly improving the reliability and security of financial transactions.

• Sensing OptiX

Huawei has launched OptiXsense EF3000, the first fiber sensing product, to help oil and gas enterprises realize unattended pipeline inspection. The identification rate of pipeline threats is as high as 97%.

Green Intelligent OptiX, Reshaping Industry Productivity

Globally, Huawei's Intelligent OptiX solution is accelerating the digitalization of cities and driving the rapid development of the digital economy in fields such as government, finance, ISP, electric power, community, hotel, and education services.

• Making e-Government Services More Efficient

Using Huawei's Single OptiX solution, Shanghai, China, has built an urban optical network which features a bandwidth of 48 Tbps per fiber and a latency of microseconds. This network not only meets Shanghai's requirements for integrated service bearing, fast deployment, and efficient collaboration, but also the requirements of e-Government service evolution for the next five to ten years. This helps propel Shanghai into the all-optical digital era characterized by Internet of Everything (IoE), gigabit transmission, and microsecond latency.

• Making Financial Transactions More Secure and Reliable

As the developer and service provider of electronic payment infrastructure in Thailand, ITMX adopts Huawei's DC OptiX solution to build its own data center interconnect (DCI) network with ms-level latency and Terabit-level bandwidth. This helps to ensure data business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) without losses or interruptions. Thanks to this electronic payment infrastructure for banks, the financial industry in Thailand sets the pace in going digital, and has gained new vitality in the financial digital economy.

• Helping ISPs Build Ultra-Wide Digital Arterial Roads for Smart Cities

As a subsidiary of Salim, Indonesia's largest consortium, FiberStar focuses on ISP services and has built ultra-broadband and secure fiber networks covering 14 provinces and 92 cities in Indonesia. In Java, two important financial cities 1000 km apart require stable and reliable backbone network connections. The biggest challenge is ensuring that service transmission is not affected when a fiber cut occurs. For this, FiberStar introduced Huawei's Single OptiX solution to build high-bandwidth reliable OTN backbone networks that serve as information highways for cities. Featuring cutting-edge technologies, these networks expand the coverage optical connections in Indonesia, and help to unleash the potential of the digital economy.

• Making Production and O&M Smarter for Electric Power Companies

CEMIG is Brazil's largest power distribution company, second largest power transmission company, and third largest power generation company. It provides electric power throughout the whole of Brazil. In 2019, CEMIG adopted Huawei's Single OptiX solution to build a smart power transmission and distribution network excelling in ultra-long-haul, low latency, high reliability, and high bandwidth. Subsequently, in 2021, CEMIG adopted Huawei's Industry OptiX solution to meet the requirements of substation informatization and unattended operation proposed by ANEEL, Brazil's National Electric Power Regulatory Authority. Using this solution, CEMIG realized functions such as border video patrol, switch status monitoring, instrument reading, and remote device control. Substation inspection was automated, improving operation efficiency by 30% and O&M efficiency by 60%.

• Making Communities Smarter

Located in downtown Dubai, Creek Harbour is a world-leading smart community built by Emaar, a multinational real estate developer. The community sprawls over more than 7.3 million square meters of residential space and 3.2 million square meters of retail, hotel, office, cultural, and public activity space. It provides space for 450,000 people to live and work. The community has introduced Huawei's FTTO solution to build an all-optical 10 Gbps network with high security and flexibility, making it a world-class green and smart community.

• Making Hotels Greener and Energy Efficient

The Orizzonte Resort in Tuscany, Italy, uses Huawei's FTTO solution to build a green, multi-service, and intelligent campus network. This network uses an innovative two-layer architecture and integrates functions of multiple networks. By building a passive network, the resort cuts carbon emissions by 6500 kg per year, equivalent to planting 300 trees. Now, visitors can easily access the Internet anytime and anywhere in the resort to enjoy an ultimate network experience.

• Delivering Smooth Campus Network Experience

The campus network of the University of Canada in Egypt needed to be upgraded to support smart operations, ubiquitous coverage, and information sharing. After adopting Huawei's FTTO solution, the campus network has been running stably, delivering high-speed coverage and premium network experience on the entire campus. In addition, the solution reduces the space usage, energy consumption, and engineering cost. Teachers and students can now smoothly use various education apps on the campus.

The use cases of green Intelligent OptiX networks are far more than just these. Featuring environmental protection, ultra-high bandwidth, ultra-low latency, and ultra-high reliability, Huawei's green Intelligent OptiX solution can lay a solid foundation for cities to go digital, reshaping industry productivity and helping various industries flourish like never before.

Continuous Innovation to Make Cities Smarter

Going forward, Huawei will continue to innovate in green, intelligent, and all-optical networks to create more scenario-specific industrial solutions, thereby fully meeting the future evolution requirements of smart cities. Boosted by nascent technologies such as Wi-Fi 7, 50G PON, and 800G, the home access bandwidth has increased from 1 Gbps to 10 Gbps, making 10G connections ubiquitous. The network capability is improved from carrier-class to industrial-class, and the network latency is reduced to microseconds, meeting the ultra-low latency requirements of industrial robot control. Meanwhile, the network availability is improved from 99.999% to 99.9999%, which meets the ultra-high reliability requirements of services such as high-frequency dispatching of power grids. From optical communication to optical sensing, the fiber scattering effect is used to sense vibration, stress, and temperature, achieving meter-level positioning accuracy. Optical networks also feature low power consumption and improve the energy usage effectiveness 10-fold compared with traditional copper networks.

In the future, with the large-scale rollout of new services such as VR, AR, holography, naked-eye 3D, and high-precision robot control, Huawei's green Intelligent OptiX solution will invigorate even more industries such as smart grids, high-speed railways, unmanned driving, and smart manufacturing. Different service scenarios have different network requirements, and continuous technology innovation will bring more possibilities in meeting these requirements. Looking ahead, Huawei will continue working with industry partners to explore more digital transformation scenarios, as well as build efficient and green communications networks to make cities smarter and the digital economy more vibrant than ever.