Huawei F5G-A Optical Communication Empowers EEP's Digital Transformation

As the world's energy transition accelerates, building efficient, reliable, and intelligent electric power infrastructure has become a cornerstone of national development. Ethiopia, one of the most promising countries in Africa, is spearheading an intelligent transformation of its power system, driven by cutting-edge ICT technologies.

As the operator of the national power grid, Ethiopian Electric Power (EEP) manages a clean energy network that includes 16 hydropower plants, one geothermal power station, one waste-to-energy facility, and four wind power stations, ensuring stable power supply across the country. With the share of clean energy steadily rising, the power system is shifting from a highly deterministic and controllable operation mode to a new stage characterized by greater uncertainty and multi-directional fluctuations across both power generation and load. Against this backdrop, power dispatch automation and grid structure upgrade urgently require the support of information technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) to enable more accurate power generation forecasting and multi-temporal-spatial collaborative optimization.

EEP's power strategy is clear: Reliable power is not only the foundation of industrial operations and improved livelihoods, but also a critical enabler for attracting foreign investment, nurturing digital industries, and advancing education and healthcare. To address increasingly complex challenges in power generation and O&M, EEP is actively adopting frontier technologies such as video-based inspection and AI-powered intelligent diagnosis. By building a modern power grid, EEP not only lights up various households, but also consolidates the foundation for sustainable industrialization and inclusive growth in Ethiopia, and injects lasting and strong momentum into the prosperity of the entire East Africa region.

At the heart of this transformation lies a robust, resilient, and reliable power communication network, which serves as the essential backbone for power grid intelligence. EEP is partnering with Huawei to comprehensively upgrade its backbone communication network and build a future-oriented smart grid communication foundation based on advanced optical communication technologies. This cooperation addresses the limitations of traditional SDH networks, such as insufficient bandwidth and complex multi-vendor operations, and redefines the role of power communications from "business support" to "business driver", laying a solid technological cornerstone for Ethiopia's next-generation power system.

Breaking Traditional SDH Networks to Build a Reliable Intelligent Communication Foundation

EEP is committed to becoming the most reliable power transmission service provider in East Africa. While meeting the nation's energy demands, EEP promotes economic decarbonization, job creation, and wealth generation. By establishing stable, intelligent, and green power infrastructure as a benchmark for national digitalization, EEP is leading Ethiopia's modernization journey on all fronts.

With the large-scale deployment of new smart grid services, such as video-based inspection, remote control, and intelligent substation, the requirements for communication networks in terms of bandwidth, latency, and reliability have risen sharply. To meet these requirements, EEP has officially launched a comprehensive modernization of its optical communication network. By leveraging Huawei's advanced multi-service optical transport network (MS-OTN) architecture and future-oriented fine-grain optical transport network (fgOTN) technology, EEP has successfully built a next-generation power communication backbone network that delivers high bandwidth, high reliability, robust security, and seamless scalability.

During this upgrade, Huawei OptiXtrans E6600 series devices were deployed to increase the network backbone bandwidth from 2.5 Gbit/s to 100 Gbit/s. Based on the dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) and time division multiplexing (TDM) convergence technology, EEP has achieved physical isolation of critical services. This ensures ultra-low latency of less than 12 ms and fast protection switching within 50 ms for core services, such as teleprotection and dispatch automation. Moreover, it reserves sufficient bandwidth resources and evolution space for high-level applications, including AI-powered grid load forecasting and digital twin power grids.

Future-Oriented Evolution: fgOTN Unleashes the Infinite Potential of Optical Networks

It is worth highlighting that the network architecture was designed from the outset with long-term evolution in mind, enabling smooth migration toward the in-depth convergence of ITU-T–defined fgOTN and DWDM. The fgOTN technology breaks through the minimum granularity limitation of traditional OTN and supports "hard pipe" connections of small-granularity services at any rate from 10 Mbit/s to 1 Gbit/s. Combined with the OTN technology, small-granularity production control services and large-bandwidth information management services can be carried in a unified manner, achieving refined scheduling and ultimate utilization of bandwidth resources. This practice is leading in the global power communication field.

Additionally, EEP has introduced Huawei's AI-driven intelligent network management system, iMaster NCE-T, to deliver "SDH-like" simplified O&M experiences. This system supports advanced functions such as intelligent fault prediction, latency visualization, and elastic bandwidth adjustment, significantly enhancing network availability and O&M efficiency and enabling intelligent management of complex networks with "clear visibility, precise control, and rapid adjustment".

From Communication Support to Value Creation: Unlocking a New Business Model for the Electric Power Industry

This network upgrade is not only a leap forward in communication technologies, but also a milestone in EEP's transformation from a traditional electric power service provider to an integrated energy and digital service provider. With the support of a highly reliable and intelligent optical communication network, EEP is actively exploring innovative business models, including bandwidth operations and public utility communication services, to convert network capabilities into sustainable commercial value.

Looking ahead, with the in-depth convergence and deployment of OTN and DWDM technologies, this network will further enable cutting-edge applications such as large-scale IoT terminal access, cross-regional data center interconnection, and real-time digital twin modeling. These advancements will provide Ethiopia with a solid digital infrastructure foundation to build a green, resilient, and intelligent clean energy system.