SANTINT's Innovations in All-Optical Factories

Advancing the digital and intelligent transformation—and driving smart manufacturing forward—has become a focal point of the new wave of international competition in industrial intelligence. As the "Made in China 2025" strategy continues to advance, intelligent manufacturing has become central to the transformation and upgrade of the manufacturing industry, as well as for driving next-generation economic growth. Against this backdrop, all-optical networks—as the next-generation fixed network communication technology—are paving the way for the digital and intelligent transformation of manufacturing. With the innovative "fiber-in and copper-out" architecture, they provide ultra-broadband, simplified, and reliable critical infrastructure, making them the top choice for new campus deployments.

SANTINT, headquartered in Zhengzhou, China, is one of the leaders of the global tinting and filling machine industry. With five subsidiaries in the USA, Brazil, Netherlands, Poland, and India, 10 overseas offices, and over 1000 employees, the company has established a comprehensive global sales and service network.

SANTINT focuses on providing customers with cutting-edge, precise tinting and packaging equipment as well as intelligent factory automation solutions. In 2022, the company invested CNY500 million in building a new, state-of-the-art factory, covering an area of approximately 52,000 square meters and with a total floor area of 129,000 square meters. The project marks a key step in the company's strategy to upgrade capacity.

To bring its smart factory vision to life, the company adopted Huawei's FTTM solution to build a next-generation industrial network infrastructure featuring a simple architecture, high reliability, and easy evolution. The aim was to build a benchmark for the digital and intelligent transformation of manufacturing.

Demanding Network Construction Requirements of the New Factory

In the journey toward intelligent manufacturing, stable and reliable network connectivity has become a critical driver of productivity. As automated guided vehicles (AGVs) take on the role of material movers on production lines, and with high personnel density and numerous connected terminals across office areas, traditional wired networks are increasingly constrained by bandwidth, coverage, and O&M challenges. SANTINT's new factory requires a network capable of adapting to diverse and complex scenarios, placing stricter requirements on the network infrastructure.

High performance to ensure productivity: The new factory encompasses multiple scenarios, including office buildings, production workshops, and outdoor areas. The office area features high personnel density and a large number of network terminals, imposing extremely high demands on wireless coverage capabilities. Traditional copper-based networks, limited by a 100-meter transmission distance, require the deployment of numerous ELV rooms and devices. Meanwhile, the production workshops are densely packed with steel racks, and AGVs operate at ground level, posing severe challenges to wireless signal coverage. Consequently, a revolution in traditional network cabling is necessary to ensure work efficiency and service continuity.

High bandwidth to secure R&D progress: Traditional network architectures struggle to meet the standards of both high bandwidth and low latency, which constricts R&D innovation and limits improvements in productivity. In contrast, the R&D area and production workshops require wired and wireless network support with ultra-low latency and high-speed bandwidth to fulfill the demands of real-time large-volume data transmission and precise control.

New networking demands to ensure flexible expansion: The new factory is massive in scale with complex workshop layouts, requiring reduced reliance on network cables to achieve flexible network deployment and rapid expansion. Traditional cabling is cumbersome and hard to scale, making it difficult to meet such needs of large-scale manufacturing plants.

Intelligent O&M to ensure troubleshooting and production: Traditional networks use active aggregation switches, which require specialized ELV rooms, wide cable trays, large numbers of cables, and a long construction cycle. With messy and tangled network cables, workshop cabinets take up a massive amount of space. SANTINT requires stable network operation, simple O&M, and precise, efficient troubleshooting, so as to build an easily evolvable and maintainable network foundation right from the design stage to support the long-term, sustainable operations of the smart factory.

FTTM Solution: Optical Connectivity for Intelligent Manufacturing, Creating New Value Together

To address the network construction requirements of SANTINT's new factory, Huawei provides an end-to-end solution centered on all-optical network and Wi-Fi 6 technologies. This drives a revolutionary upgrade in network architecture and intelligent O&M, resolving challenges such as high-density access, complex environment coverage, and long-term O&M. In this way, the solution helps to build a digital and intelligent foundation featuring a simplified architecture, high reliability, and smooth evolution for the smart factory.

• Dual-Core Architecture: A New Architecture for Stability and Efficiency

The solution adopts dual core switches, dual OLT devices, and a Type B dual-uplink protection architecture to achieve end-to-end redundancy backup, building a stable and reliable network core. This dual-core architecture ensures high network availability and redundancy protection, safeguarding the network against failures in backbone fibers, branch fibers, optical splitters, OLTs, and ONU PON ports alike.

• All-Optical Coverage: A New Experience of High Speed and Low Latency

Powered by 10G PON and Wi-Fi 6, the system achieves an air interface bandwidth of 10.75 Gbps across 16 spatial streams, delivering high-speed wireless coverage and ultra-low latency transmission throughout the entire factory area. Network isolation for different departments is achieved under a single SSID, balancing convenient access with data security. Large-volume data transmission and real-time control during R&D and manufacturing processes greatly enhance work efficiency and product quality.

• Passive Deployment: A New Space for Flexible Expansion

Passive optical splitters are used to replace active switches. With optical fibers running directly to machines, the solution achieves flexible network deployment and rapid expansion. It also effectively reduces equipment room construction and cabling costs while improving space utilization for SANTINT's new factory. Meanwhile, the fiber-to-the-machine architecture reduces cable and cable-tray space usage by 80% and cuts deployment time by 50%. Thanks to the long transmission distance of optical fibers, the solution perfectly meets the demands of large-scale factory deployment.

• Intelligent and Simplified O&M: A New Realm of Efficient Management

Powered by eSight, a network management system, the solution achieves unified management across the entire network, supporting plug-and-play ONUs and automated service provisioning. The digital map displays the device status in real time, enabling one-click fault diagnosis for rapid fault locating. Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP) and a visualized user interface lower the O&M barrier, allowing non-technical personnel to manage the network with ease. O&M efficiency is boosted by 60%, achieving the intelligent O&M goal of one person managing an entire campus.

The in-depth collaboration between SANTINT and Huawei is a technological breakthrough as well as a successful validation of future smart factory construction models. The introduction of the FTTM solution has not only resolved numerous challenges faced by traditional network architectures in smart factory deployment, but has also provided robust support for the digital and intelligent transformation of the manufacturing industry. Looking ahead, Huawei will continue to develop innovative technologies and open architectures to empower more enterprises in stepping into the new era of smart factories, jointly building an all-connected intelligent world amid the wave of industrial Internet.