Huawei SPN Helps Yunnan Power Grid Build a Next-Gen High-Speed Bearer Network

As energy restructuring advances and digital, intelligent transformation continues, the power grid is evolving from a transmission network into an energy data network.

As a key energy hub in Southwest China, Yunnan Power Grid Co., Ltd. (Yunnan Power Grid) is tasked with large-scale clean energy transmission and smart grid development. However, the region's complex terrain and long transmission lines have made this transformation challenging, rendering the digital and intelligent upgrade increasingly urgent. The explosion of production data and the rise of complex service scenarios further amplify this urgency, imposing ever-stricter requirements on the underlying communication bearer network.

Yunnan Power Grid has partnered with Huawei to introduce the Slicing Packet Network (SPN) technology, together building a next-gen power communication bearer network. This collaboration not only overcomes obstacles faced by legacy networks, but also strengthens the power source-grid-load-storage interaction and flexible control, lighting up a beacon for the digital and intelligent transformation of the power industry.

Network Transport Challenges in the Digital and Intelligent Transformation of the Power Industry

Originally built around 2006, Yunnan Power Grid's communication network was based on Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH). After nearly two decades in service, the aging infrastructure now suffers from high hardware failure rates and the risk of spare part shortages. More critically, its underlying architecture is not sophisticated enough to support further digital and intelligent transformation.

Once-dominant low-speed and narrowband services are giving way to intelligent, high-bandwidth applications. However, such applications bring challenges of their own.

 The deployment of inspection robots and HD video observation in substations, together with an anticipated explosion of unattended transmission line inspections in remote areas, is expected to cause frequent frame freezing on the original narrowband network, limiting production efficiency.

 The new power distribution system necessitates frequent power source-grid-load-storage interaction, driving a shift in grid dispatch toward flexible control. This evolution requires not only a substantial expansion of communication capacity but also ultra-low latency, absolute reliability, and rigid isolation between services.

To tackle these issues, Yunnan Power Grid has chosen SPN to drive the evolution of its next-gen bearer network, incorporating it into both the 14th and 15th Five-Year Plans. The company has progressively rolled out the technology on a large scale across 16 cities, laying a communication foundation for the next two decades. In this strategic upgrade, Huawei has emerged as a key partner.

SPN Creates Pipeline for Next-Gen Power Grid Bearer Network

In 2022, Qujing Power Supply Bureau partnered with Huawei to launch a pilot deployment of SPN, replacing legacy network A to support video observation and power transmission line inspection services. This marked the first commercial application of the constant bit rate (CBR) function on SPN devices in China.

The pilot results demonstrated that SPN devices deliver outstanding network slicing isolation capabilities and high-precision CBR performance, enabling end-to-end timeslot isolation for low-bandwidth services on a high-bandwidth platform. These capabilities effectively meet the power grid's stringent requirements for high reliability and low latency in real-time control services. The pilot confirmed that SPN has reached maturity for power grid scenarios.

SPN combines the reliability of SDH with the flexibility of Multiprotocol Label Switching-Transport Profile (MPLS-TP), while achieving lower latency and more refined service quality assurance. Its key technologies include:

 Synchronous packet switching (SPS): Provides high-precision time synchronization to the sub-millisecond or even nanosecond, meeting the strict time sequence requirements of power automation and delivering accuracy in data collection and command execution.

 Flexible network slicing: Leverages FlexE hard slicing and soft slicing to partition a single physical network into multiple logical private networks. This achieves physical isolation for critical production services, enables dynamic resource allocation to avoid waste, and significantly improves bandwidth reuse.

 Intelligent operation, administration, and maintenance (OAM): Offers a built-in OAM mechanism that monitors Service Level Agreement (SLA) metrics like latency and packet loss rate, locates faults in minutes, and enables self-healing, substantially reducing O&M complexity.

Dual Dividends: Ultimate Experience and Long-Term Value

Since the pilot in 2022, SPN has evolved from a technical trial to a standard architecture across Yunnan Province. With SPN now being deployed in Zhaotong and Pu'er, the full value of the next-gen bearer network is being unleashed.

First, the bandwidth bottleneck has been resolved. The next-gen SPN bearer network breaks through the original capacity ceiling range of 155 Mbit/s to 10 Gbit/s. With SPN devices, the bandwidth of the integrated data network access sites, such as substations, power supply stations, and customer service centers, has increased to 1 Gbit/s, meeting the requirements set by China Southern Power Grid. Bandwidth at the aggregation and core layers has been upgraded to 50 Gbit/s or 100 Gbit/s, depending on the site and service scale. The solution supports 10 Mbit/s small-granularity hard pipes, enabling end-to-end exclusive isolation for power private lines. This meets the high-bandwidth demands of services such as power transmission video observation, resolves bandwidth bottlenecks, and paves a smooth evolution path.

Second, the bandwidth upgrade has significantly improved inspection and maintenance efficiency. Huawei's SPN solution monitors latency, packet loss, and other SLA metrics in real time, and can locate and demarcate faults in minutes. This reduces maintenance costs incurred by the high failure rate of SDH equipment. For example, at the Qujing Power Supply Bureau, the time required for a single online inspection and maintenance task has been reduced from 30 minutes to just 3 minutes. The time for a full inspection and maintenance cycle has dropped from over 7 hours to 21 minutes. The O&M center can now detect major defects based on preset monitoring points, advancing defect detection by 15 days. Over six months, the number of site visits for inspection and maintenance fell from 112 to 61, a reduction of 45.54%.

Third, the intelligence level of service transport has been greatly improved. Electric power services are diverse, ranging from latency-sensitive teleprotection signals and dispatching instructions to high-traffic video data, all of which must be reliably carried by the network. Huawei's SPN solution leverages FlexE hard slicing and soft slicing to ensure rigid isolation across different service types while improving bandwidth reuse efficiency. It also supports IPv4/IPv6 dual stack, enabling flexible, nearby service forwarding and facilitating access to extensive IoT services, such as power transmission line detection and source-grid-load-storage interaction.

Finally, SPN provides long-term investment protection. The evolution to 25 Gbit/s to 400 Gbit/s rates can be supported through low-cost upgrades, avoiding repeated construction.

In summary, the full deployment of the SPN bearer network has resolved long-standing pain points for Yunnan Power Grid, including limited capacity, difficult evolution, and high failure rates associated with legacy communication systems. This has laid a solid foundation for digital and intelligent services characterized by heavy traffic and high concurrency.

Looking ahead, Yunnan Power Grid is accelerating the application of SPN technology. SPN construction is now in full swing in Wenshan, Honghe, Dehong, and other areas. As a key participant in this digital and intelligent transformation, Huawei is working closely with Yunnan Power Grid to transform outdated communication networks into intelligent, ultra-broadband next-gen power transmission networks, setting a benchmark for the construction of new power systems nationwide.